Cracked Time

 

This morning, while swimming back down the pool, my left hand inadvertently hit the side of the pool, not hard enough to hurt myself, but hard enough to find the sweet spot of my smart watch’s screen and crack the face and take a small but essential chunk out of the strengthened glass.  To be fair to the timepiece, it is still telling the time, but the touch sensitive quality of the broken screen is not irreparably lost.

     To someone like myself, a noted relojophile (I think the combination of Spanish and Greek in that neologism is more than satisfying) a broken watch is not a disaster, it is far more an opportunity.

     I could, of course, go to my boxed collection of older watches and choose one (or twenty!) to attach to my wrist, and there might even be a few rejected smart watches to choose. 

I could also, as I am at the moment, revert to and wear my ‘emergency’ watch, a Seiko that almost comically ticks almost all of the boxes for a perfect watch.  The model is a Seiko ‘Rail Road Approved’ smallish white face, with Arabic numbers, day/date, sweep second hand, luminous hour and minute hands, waterproof for swimming, and solar charging.  I leave it out on a sunny shelf and it is constantly ready to head wristward should anything untoward happen to my smart watch of choice: the Amazfit GTR.

     As I said, I do have choices, many choices, to replace the broken watch, and the replacement was on sale in Amazon and other outlets for a more than reasonable prime considering what the watch can actually do.  But, as I also said, I see destruction as a chance to try and better what I had.

     As with smart watches, so with mobile phones, we seem to have reached a stage in their development where we are asked to pay more and more for what I seem to remember from painful A Level economics classes is “eventually diminishing” returns.  The so-called ‘flagship’ phones of all the major brands (including those who used to be considered budget but excellent value for money) are absurdly expensive, and if you go to the extent of getting a foldable phone, astronomically expensive!  And, of all the much-vaunted attributes of the machine, how many are actually used by the individual purchaser?  Like computers and the programs that we use on them, we (well, I) barely scrape the surface of what they can do.

     If I am truthful about my smart watch use, I need the thing to tell the time with an always-on display and count my lengths while I swim and the distance I go for my morning bike ride after my swim.  And that’s just about it.  My simple demands do not, of course, stop me from pouring over the almost unending list of things that my watch could do if I understood how to get it to do it.  I find it difficult enough to get my watch to evaluate my exercise before my swim and then to switch to counting my lengths – something to do with moisture on the touch sensitive screen, and it’s always touch and go about whether I can make the thing work.

     Informing me about the receipt of emails and messages, linking to Alexa, storing music, remotely answering my mobile phone and all the other things that the watch allegedly finds simplicity itself, become much more complicated when I get my hands on the thing and the functioning of all these add-ons becomes much more problematical.

     But, with watches, I am an eternal optimist.  I believe in the incrementally commercially inexorable movement towards horological perfection and that what I experienced only imperfectly in one iteration of the watch will become sublime in a later one.

     I suppose that all of the above is going a long way round the houses to say that instead of using one or other of my numerous watches to fill the gap left by my broken (but still time telling) one, I decided after a Nano second’s hesitation to buy new.

     And not only new, but also falling into the patently obvious manufacturer’s trap of a so-called ‘limited edition’ version of something I could have got cheaper in its un-limited form. 

     But, I am ashamed (and yet defiant) to admit, that I was seduced by a bit of bling (it is gold coloured) and by the fact that it comes in a much nicer and more sophisticated box than the common or garden version!

     Sometimes I surprise even myself by how gullible I am when confronted by blatant ego flattering commercialism, but, as I am sure Truss the Heartless Far Right Zealot would assure me, my purchase is doing its bit to ensure the ‘trickle down’ of wealth!

     For some strange reason that thought does not  comfort me.  At all.