i guess now that phones are a thing you dont need a watch but pre-phone everyone who didnt wear a watch was a fucking chump, and itrs STILL a good idea now cuz what if youre in a no-phone situation, or just dontr want to bring your phone, etc
i used to wear a watch all the time and i miss it
(i stopped cause the strap broke and kept needing to be replaced and I decided it wasn’t actually worth the effort to figure how to find someone who would sell me a non-shitty watch strap when I already was carrying a phone with me at all times. The watch itself is fine and I could totally go back to using it)
i remember the era before everyone had a phone though. People kept asking me the time.
I get compliments on my watch sometimes at work. The customers think it’s a by-electronics-standards antique, guessing that it’s from the 80′s. Actually I bought it at Walmart in like 2013 for $20, and they’re still readily available for not that much more [link].
I really like this design: it’s elegant, shiny, doesn’t depend on Velcro (which wears out a lot faster than clasps) like most of my childhood watches did. It runs slow by about one second every 2.5 days: roughly once a month I sync it with time.gov.
Even now that I have a phone I plan to replace this watch if/when it wears out, preferably with an identical one. I like being able to just glance at it rather than have to take my phone out, dumbwatches are permitted in many contexts (work, exam rooms) where general-purpose computers are not, and the battery lasts much, *much* longer than a phone or smartwatch battery. I’m not sure I’ve *ever* had to recharge this watch, and if I did it was only once.
I used to wear a wristwatch pretty consistently, because they are much handier than phones, but for some reason I have a bad habit of snagging the watch face on something (like a doorjamb) and ripping it right off, so I haven’t replaced my latest one yet. :P
That watch takes me back – it looks a lot like the one I remember my father wearing in the actual ‘80s.
I stopped wearing a wristwatch in my teens/early twenties, because I had a problem with wrist perspiration: if I wore a watch with a fabric wristband, the band got manky very quickly, and if I wore one with a metal band, the metal corroded and I got a nasty rash on my arm.
I tried a pocketwatch for a while, because I have a secret hankering for nice waistcoats that doesn’t match any other aspect of my lifestyle, but I couldn’t afford a good pocketwatch and for that matter I couldn’t afford a good waistcoat either, which made the whole thing less convenient, and after the watch broke I didn’t persist.
At that point, I probably could have tried wristwatches again – whatever hormonal thing had been causing the perspiration issue had long since settled down – but by that point, there were electronic devices with clocks on them everywhere I went so I didn’t see any point.
(In a slightly better-ordered world, I might be wearing a smartwatch right now, because I bought one of those wrist step counter gadgets in an attempt to keep myself active while I was stuck at home… but I can’t get the farshlugginer thing to work.)
Yeah, I bought this watch in large part because it resembles my dad’s watch and I like the way his looks.
(I don’t think *his* watch is literally from the 80′s either, but as someone who was a young adult in the 80′s he comes by the aesthetic honestly.)
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