Boring Watches
If you want to get 30 or so people motivated to do exactly what you want to do, you have to temporarily rise to the skill level of an actor performing Hamlet for the necessary amount of coercion.
This week, I had to travel (due to my 9-5) to a small town in Germany. Picture a christmas postcard: you know the one with the tiny idyllic town with all the snow covering the rooftops with a church steeple with its single yellow window lit against that blue-ish purple-ish night time sky filled with stars? Same town. I was there not only to meet some other coworkers based a few hundred miles (kilometers, too; I’m still getting the hang of conversions (not at all)) from Berlin but also to take part in several on-site team building events. After arriving a little after 2PM on a Sunday, and seeing that every restaurant and anything remotely interesting to do around town was closed for the day, I sat in my hotel room nibbling on the three cookies I’d bought on the train. With my more than adequate meal where counting calories was crucial, I sat at the foot of the bed and thought of how I was going to stave off the next several hours of boredom. So, I turned to Youtube and down the watch video rabbit hole I went.
After four or five years in this hobby, my tastes have drifted with the watch content I consume. In the beginning, it was all in depth reviews of watches that were 14+ minutes long that I was seriously considering buying or watching/reading those “Top Ten Watches to Buy in ‘X’” price range. I still think these are pretty useful bits of content in their own right even if I no longer prefer them. Nowadays I just read or watch reviews or analysis of watches on my grail list, ones I’ve owned, or ones I’ve been loaned to try out. It's a little bit of confirmation bias and just genuine, “I wonder what other people think about this watch?”. I’d like to say it's my flawless good taste in watch choices (obviously) but most of those articles and videos are fairly positive in their viewpoints.
And then I go to the comments.
There’s an old internet saying that goes something like, “Just…don’t read the comments”. But those are real people who can speak their minds honestly. I’m not saying the creators of that content can’t be honest but that they have more of a responsibility to do their analyses or reviews in a more balanced, thoughtful way. So, I like to see what discourse the other watch hobbyists are creating. I’d just finished reading a review on the SUF Helsinki 180 when I went down to read those comments. I found one that (paraphrasing) said, “3000 dollars for this? It's such a boring watch, it's not even worth that. You can get ‘x-brand’ at the same price point and be way more satisfied!”
My first thought was unkind. The second thought was, “That brought absolutely nothing to the table.”
The observation felt like there was a certain wrongness to it. That because it was seen, in this case, as boring, that perhaps it was not worth its value or in a larger sense that it wasn’t worthy at all, period. That it had been found lacking. Which is a fair bit of a deep dive coming from a single comment that was probably less than 40 words altogether but it rubbed me the wrong way. An observation made and an opinion formed from that observation are fine. When it turns to dismissal without acknowledgement is where it becomes a problem. Again, there will always be divides in a hobby made up of more than one person. But maybe that’s where that whole “snobbish'' watch hobbyist archetype perception comes from. Making broad, sweeping statements without acknowledging, “Different folks, different strokes.”
Our bosses thought that we were an adventurous lot. I like walking around and exploring cities. I can go for a gentle hike then gondola ride up the side of a mountain. On Tuesday, we went for a not so gentle hike. At sunset. To a little restaurant. And then we were to hike back down in the dark. Naturally, (naturally!) there was snow on the trail and the temperature was slowly dipping its toe over the line of freezing before the sun was going down. Some Germans here will undoubtedly recognize the “hike and chill'' vibe because it's so ingrained in the culture you don’t even think about it. You may also remember doing night hikes as children with your flashlights and having this sense of wonder and awe of a secret adventure.
I, however, was hiking in my office shoes.
My ride had forgotten to drop me off at the hotel to pick up my ratty pair of walking shoes (the Addidas Air Dad 3000s) and an extra layer for warmth so there I went in my business casual attire. But at least my wrist was correctly equipped with the Explorer. My dark blue chinos, while stylish, were of no help here. My gray suprima cotton blend sweater, as it turns out, did not keep the cold out. The sun reflecting off of the snow began to blind me so I had to look up from my terror-filled monotonous blend of hiking (checking for icy spots and stable footholds) to look to my left and right. “Okay…that’s a pretty nice view…”. Looking over the Christmas town from a greater vantage point made me wish I’d had my Nikon with me (also warm and safe in the hotel room). But the lack of gear (and sunglasses) let me take in the full scope of the views and the landscape in a way I wasn’t mentally prepared to enjoy in the first place. The hike was elevating my appreciation of what I hadn’t acknowledged as maybe, maybe worth appreciating for what it was: something simply nice.
I don’t know if that comment dovetailed into a larger conversation about microbrands in general or not. When it comes to price-level talk, there's usually a comparison to the bigger names or more popular microbrands, much of what the commenter had done. The thing about those microbrands is…not everything is made for everyone in mind. Sometimes they are scratching a niche itch. For instance, I love muted tones. I love watches that fly under the radar, that have a small presence on my wrist and out in the world of watches. I love tiny little blue or red accents that don’t take away from the dial but enhance it a little bit. The 180 was made with someone like me in mind. Where I see a mix of subtle complementary colors, of simple minimalistic designs that somehow accentuate both the complexity and the “every part has a purpose” slivers of horology, some people see the equivalent of a baked potato. Just…bland.
The wood burning stove behind us sputtered and crunched as the giant copper pot resting on top sizzled with some unidentifiable mixture. The windows were thin there but you couldn’t tell, that stove and the kitchen were putting in overtime to make sure the atmosphere checked every available cozy benchmark. But as I sat down in that cabin restaurant, I realized there were no menus. Our company had ordered ahead, making sure everyone had a serving of the mandatory spaetzle.
“Spaetzle?” You ask, “What's that?”
The Germans told me it was like mac and cheese. Technically, it is noodles and cheese. But spaetzle is to mac and cheese like water is to a drink. Big Technicality. The dish also came with grilled, sweet onions muttered across the top of it to really liven it up. Every culture adds something different to their pasta dishes and that's fantastic. For instance, at my table, the others joked that Americans make their pasta dishes so oily. “Don’t you mean cheesy?” One of them retorted. “Right, that's what they consider oil!” The other guffawed. I looked at my onions. I looked around the room. I don’t consider myself a die hard patriot but I was ready to throw down.
“I could take them,” I thought furiously to my fork, eying the onions slipping off of my tongs.
But as the time passed and the abomination settled in our stomachs, I hatched my plan to “Get Out of Here ASAP”. I yawned loudly, raised my Explorer to eye level, and slapped the restaurant's table with enough force to make everyone in the room unconsciously glance at the noise. My partner next to me saw this, checked his phone, and proclaimed in a raised voice, “Yeeeeeah, it's getting to be about that time, isn’t it?” The time was 930PM and we had to hike down an icy mountain for 50 minutes with german torches called fackel which are just version 2.0 of the medieval torch. I raised my eyebrows, gave him the side eye and said, matching his pitch, “Man, it has been time!”
END SCENE. Exit stage left, pursued by a bear.
There will always be discussion and discourse in a hobby. Or in life when one considers the ramifications of introducing onions to a dish and finds that perhaps their guests don’t care for that . That’s just how it goes. People have opinions and in 99% of cases (excusing the extreme ones like, I don’t know, Hitler was wrong (hot take!)) it's generally healthy to have them. I’m not here to slap wrists and tell you all to be kinder to each other and in your life choices (you probably should anyway (damn, there I go)). But one person’s boring is another person’s peak. Someone else's horological passion turned dream turned reality. How a long, cold trek in the dark evolved into a core memory: where the crackle of flames mixed with the crunching of snow, an opinion slowly shifted, and an acknowledgement was made as their leading footprints brought the tired and the weary back home.