In The Future

The future ‘aint what it used to be.

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The future of wristwatches

February 22nd, 2008 · 304 Comments

One of the saddest days of my boyhood happed the day my dad and I went sailing in our little styrofoam Snark in Cherry Creek Reservoir. A gust of wind caught the little sail before we had the daggerboard down all the way, and we found ourselves in the drink. I popped up to find a face-full of wet sailcloth without even a tiny pocket of air. But before I had a chance to freak out, my dad was able to pull the sail off of my face so I could get some air. We got back in the boat as best we could, paddled back to the dock try again. That was when my pop slapped his wrist, “Aw nuts, I lost my watch.”

That was the Omega DeVille that he had always promised to give to me someday, the one he was proud of, the waterproof Omega, the self-winding wonder. In a second, gone. But the days of being able to afford an Omega again were long gone by the time my dad was laid off from Martin Marietta, and by the time I scraped my paper-route money together for that little Montgomery Wards boat. After the Omega, my dad had a long string of boring, yet completely functional Timex, Casio and Citizen watches. His favorite joke was to tell me that the Omega was probably still down on the bottom of Cherry Creek Reservoir, still ticking away. The thought of watch as superhero made me more sad for its loss.

Then many years later, a few years before I was married, it seemed like the right time to buy an astounding watch, just like my dad had done. I would buy an Omega that I would never be able to afford once I was laden with wife and children. I chose the Omega Seamaster Multifunction, a gorgeous watch that I then abused the snot out of, crashing on my snakeboard, and throwing across the hallway in an argument. It was an Omega, I figured, if the watch could take a trip to the moon, then it could take anything I could give it.

But the Seamaster wasn’t the one that went to the moon. The Seamaster was a more delicate watch. Finally, last month, the watch stopped working when I crashed again, on my snakeboard. Apparently the g-forces of my hand hitting the pavement were enough to stun that watch. I would get it working again, as I always had before. But fate intervened, and before I realized it, the Omega had apparently been stolen from the inside of our house. (Long story, don’t ask.)

And now I sit In The Future, writing about wristwatches.  I should do what my dad did, and get a functional digital watch for twenty bucks or so and call it a day. Or perhaps I should do what my brother-in-law the C.E.O. does, and not even bother with a watch. I always have either a cell-phone or a Palm Pilot in my pocket, what’s the point of a watch?

But the problem it seems, is that I’m a snob. Or to paraphrase Groucho Marx, I wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have someone like me as a member. The problem is that I have a fragile ego, a shallow self-worth, a low opinion of myself, or whatever else it is that makes a rational man want to strap an exclusive, expensive watch to his wrist that will do nothing more than a $20 plastic watch, and definitely less than the modern equivalent of the pocket-watch, the ubiquitous cell-phone or Blackberry.

It’s comedy. Millions of men around the world insist on wearing expensive timepieces that have been made obsolete by the march of technology. Case in point? If you are a U.S. astronaut, you are only allowed to wear a watch that has been certified by NASA when you go on your mission. And the watches certified by NASA as being rugged enough, accurate enough and reliable enough to be mission critical? A $2,500 Omega. Oh, and also a $50 Casio or a $60 Timex.

NASA confirms it, the cheap watches do the job well enough to have a few billion dollars in hardware depending on them. Yet apparently that isn’t good enough for men like me, who insist that only the $2,500 Omega will be the proper copilot for our lives as we take a shower, drive to work, and do a controlled re-entry in the meeting room.  What it really boils down to is classism. I want that expensive watch to prove to the person with whom I do business that I am of a certain social class, worthy of that person’s attention, trust and consideration.

My character has been distilled and implanted into a wrist instrument.

How does that feel? It feels like I am even more of a shallow, worthless person. But when I look into my ‘second face’ I am engulfed by feelings of pure love, not from concentrate. I assume this is the way some women feel when they gaze into the maw of their third-finger rock, their beautiful stone. In the case of women, their feeling are amplified somehow by diamond, the perfect stone made even more perfect by the jeweler’s grind stone. And in our case, the feeling is amplified by a tiny world of mechanical and electronic wizardry, whirring away in its hermetically-sealed world that lives atop our wrists. Surely this must be a feeling similar to the one of creation, no?

Now, how can the future rob us of these pure feelings? Answer … the future won’t rob us of them, there will be watches galore in the future, and they will contain our cellular phones, our Bluetooth connection, our PDAs, and our digital cameras. They will even show the time. Then there will be me and my ilk, the hopeless snobs, or perhaps the purveyors or fine Horology. And for me and my ilk will be companies that survive by manufacturing and selling us the wares we need to achieve self-realization. There will still be mechanically-sprung watches on wrists and there will be classism.

Many lovely things will happen in the future, but people will always feel the need to feel superior to people they hate and people they love. And so in the future, there will be watches.

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