Tuesday 8 February 2005

Pic of the day: Digital watch, pale hairy arm. All mine. Though the watch is replaceable.

Wristwatch day

Yesterday evening, the rubber "chain" of my wristwatch just snapped. I suppose I could have tried to buy some glue, or even melt it together (though I doubt that would work with this kind of rubber). But I didn't. Instead today I brought it back to the shop where I bought it, and got a new chain just the same as the old. Set me back kr 108, or ca $16. Yeah, I guess I could have bought glue cheaper and maybe it would have worked and I could have given the money to the poor. Well, now the shopkeeper can give the money to the poor if he is so inclined. Probably not. I'm not so worried about that, but I'm slightly worried that I hardly even considered it. I'm starting to feel rich, I suppose, and that can hardly be good.

The watch, however, is quite good. It is a pretty standard digital watch, displaying the most common stuff, nothing fancy. It also beeps slightly each whole hour, which is nifty because if I notice I can turn on the radio for the news. I also set it to beeping furiously at 8 in the morning, which may help the clock radio in its attempt to wake me. Good luck. There are also some other functions that I haven't memorized because I don't use them.

For the duration of the workday, I wore my old watch, the mechanical one. It is better looking, so say those who know such things, and I would say it is certainly more expensive looking. Which is fair, since it actually was more expensive. Quite a bit more, like double or triple the price, something like that. It is a good watch, amazingly accurate for something with moving parts. Even after several months, it was exactly one hour off. (It was still in daylight savings time, or is it the other way around? I forget which is which. It still acted like it was summer, anyway.) The day of week was of course correct. But the day of month was three days off, as it did not notice when a month had less than 31 days. That's easy for an electronic watch to know, but evidently too much to hope for in a mechanical one.

The reason why I chose that particular mechanical watch was that it glowed in the dark. It absorbs energy from daylight and portions it out through the night, rather than using radioactive isotopes to power its light in the night. It is rather faint come morning, but by then I am usually sound asleep anyway... But when I had to hand it in for repairs, I bought this ordinary digital watch instead, and ended up wearing it each day while the good-looking one was left on my bedroom table.

Since this is just a slice of life entry, I won't say anything deep about the nature of time or anything. However, I will say something about me. Namely, I think time in numbers. I actually think 16:44 rather than "sixteen minutes to five" or even "one minute to quarter to five". So if I'm wearing a round watch, I have to convert the time in my head, but if I have a digital watch I don't. That's the kind of man I am.