The Watch

My new watch isn't as good as my old one.

Have I even mentioned how much I loved my old watch? It was a Timex from the "Expedition" series. I bought it almost completely by accident a couple of years ago from Rebel Sports. It was about a month before the Julia Creek Dirt'n'Dust Triathlon and I wanted a watch that was likely to survive dust, mud, water, sweat, sun and a whole pile of other conditions likely to completely ruin the cheap watches I usually wear.

This was the first time I've bothered paying more than $20 for a watch, and I fell head over heels in love with it. Three time zones (and at one point I actually used all three), three alarms (brilliant!), a stop watch with lap settings, a timer, a 'hydro' function that beeps every set number of minutes and an "occasion" setting for anniversaries/birthdays and the like (which I never worked out how to programme). Oh, yeah, and the light, but whatever. It probably has other features too, for all I know.

About those alarms... Three of them. And you could set them to go off everyday or only on weekends. I had one to remind me it was getting late and I should probably stop reading now. One to start the whole waking up process and one to mark the time when I really had to get out of bed if I was too lazy to get up when the first alarm went off. Good stuff.

Oh, and it didn't obviously look like a man's watch. I mean, it was extremely useful, so obviously it was a man's watch (nothing designed for women is meant to be useful - just pretty. After all, women don't do useful things and are meant to sit around being pretty...), but it looked nice and unisex. I didn't feel like I was wearing an obviously gendered piece of equipment (which I often do when I opt for the useful things).

I really, really loved this watch. I loved this watch more than most people love their phones. With this watch on my wrist, I felt like I could take on the world. Even when I wasn't wearing the watch, it was close by. I keep it on my bedside table when I sleep...

Sadly, for a $100+ watch, it had a fatal flaw. The same flaw most watches have - the band. After two years of being being worn all day, every day and being dragged through every weird thing I felt like doing, the band snapped. It was connected to the watch in a very peculiar fashion, so that regular watch repairing people couldn't replace it for me. I even found a shop that specialised in Timex watches, and they said it was unlikely the company made those bands any more (after two years? Who are these people?). Besides, I had no idea where my warranty was, and no one seemed interested in sending it back to the factory for a replacement band without one.

So I decided to buy a new Timex watch. One with a band I could easily replace when it failed. Which is when I discovered their nefarious scheme. You see, NONE of the watches that have the kind of functionality with which I have fallen in love have normal, easily replaced bands. The only watches that had practical bands had fewer functions. I wasn't going to fall for that trick again, so this time around I went for the band rather than the multiple alarms...

And, dammit, this watch isn't as good. I really want multiple alarms. I really, really want them. I can live with only two time zones. The fact that the timer can be set to repeat so that it can do the same thing as the hydro function is okay. I can live without the occasion function (I never used it any way). But I really, really want my multiple alarms. This watch will let me set the alarm for every day, weekdays or weekends, but what's the point of having the option to set the alarm for weekdays or weekends if you can't have a different alarm for each?

I have valiantly tried to save the old watch by stitching it onto the band for another, cheap watch, but now it just looks like some ugly franken-watch. I still have it by my bedside, but I don't feel comfortable wearing it to work - especially when I have a nice-looking non-franken-watch I could be wearing.

Just one that's not as good.