A Luddite and His Timex Watch - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Watch Out!

Some millionaire on the a.m. radio was pitying himself the other day: his expensive, high-tech, high-tone Fruit™ watch (or was it a vegetable watch?) wasn’t acting right, wouldn’t hold a charge, and had to be re-programmed every day until tech support (or Tech Support) worked their magic on it.

Mr. Millionaire, meet the $10 Timex. Oops - it’s up to $24 now. My Timex, which “takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” as John Cameron Swayze used to say, cost only $10 at Giganto-Mart, but that was years ago.

A Timex needs no programming; all you do is re-set it twice a year for the semi-annual fall-fully-forward-spring-latch-back-attack thing.

The basic Timex watch is soooooooooooooo uncool. A Timex will not impress your date. A Timex will not impress your beagle. A Timex is redolent of the pool room, not the board room. A discriminating mugger will sneer at a Timex with the same contempt he once demonstrated for the Ford Fiesta. A Timex does not speak of elegance, guess your height and weight, tell you the future, measure the deterioration of your liver, or calculate the decay of the planet’s orbit around the sun. All a Timex does is show you the time with two little pointers, also known as hands, although they aren’t really hands. We just call them hands, you see.

Clever people, those Chinese, to have invented such a cheap and reliable way of telling time. Not that time will listen to what you tell it.

A Timex comes in a variety of colors and straps, and some variations are named Expedition™ and Iron Man™ and such, plain little ol’ watches that have watched too many Rambo movies and have costumed themselves in dime-store camouflage and outfitted themselves with itty-bitty Russian Kalashnikovs.

When the battery in a Timex wears out, you can usually replace it yourself. Just unscrew the back, drop the battery, note the number, and go to the drug store for a replacement. This is needful only every two or three years, sometimes longer.

A watch should not need programming. Nor should a radio or a teevee set or a telephone, but the STEMinstas will not have it that when you buy something it should simply work. Oh, no; now you must read books and access sites and give strangers your credit card numbers and a snapshot of your passport in order to validate and start up a gadget for which you have already paid.

I suppose next we’ll have to program our pocket knives and fountain pens. A carpenter roofing in the hot sun might have to knock off work for an hour to access a spiderwebsite and purchase a yearly update for his hammer. Screwdrivers might need occasional re-programming. And don’t get me started on the complications of electronic 2 x 4s.

Young people might find adapting to a wristwatch of any kind a challenge. Instead of automatically reaching into a pocket or purse for the MePhone to check the time they would have to learn how to swing an arm out and up to read the little dial. And, yes, they’d have to figure out what “hands” are and how to work out the time from the hands’ positions.

But then, wearing a watch at all, even a Timex, might enhance a young man or woman’s coolness factor: “Hey, Heather-Misty-Dakota-Shane, what’s that neat-looking thing on your wrist? I’ve got to get me one!”

Well, as they say in that old movie in which James Arness plays a giant, carnivorous carrot, “Watch the skies!”

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