Bloggin' Umholtz

Tic Toc

Time. We get wrapped up in it. We get addicted to it. In this hectic rat race of a world it becomes all important to know what time it is...every minute of the day.

Why then, can't I get a watch that does what I want it to do? Walk into any department store and browse through the watches. There are watches from five dollars to five thousand dollars out there. There are watches that will work under three hundred feet of water in case it becomes imperative for you to know your exact time of death as your car plunges into San Fransico Bay. Your errant driving caused by... you guessed it, taking your eyes off the road to check the time. There are watches guaranteed to work on the moon. Planning a trip there any time soon? There are watches that tell time in several time zones, in case your Sybil like personalties refuse to cohabitate in the same geographical location. There are even watches that have GPS units built in, in case you want to know the exact location you got lost on that fog shrouded highway above...San Fransisco Bay.

I seldom wear a watch anymore. In fact I avoided wearing watches as much as possible in my life. It all started in elementary school. You see, as children would do, we played walking home from school. No, there were no buses then and yes, it was uphill both ways. Well playing would lead to grass stains and torn pants etc, and more often than not this occured within the first few weeks of school and when you got home... well lets just say the parental units weren't too thrilled with newly bought school clothes being "ruined" I of course thought they were still perfectly functional and didn't give a darn what they looked like. What does this have to do with watches, you ask?

Well my opinion of clothing, functional above appearance translated to watches. All I ever needed a watch to do was tell me the time. It didn't even have to be accurate. just consistent. If it was five minutes, that was OK as long as it was always five minutes off. Therefore, and because I now have to buy my own clothes and watches, I buy the cheapest functional watch I can find. After all, I primarily only wear it for hunting which translates into about 20-30 days out of the year. Oh geez...don't let my wife figure out that I actually devote an entire month to hunting each year. Please, please don't rat me out.

My ideal watch? Digital. Not because it's cool, but because it's the only watch that you can buy that lights up in the dark. This is a hunting necessity. That's it. Tell me the time and glow in the dark. I'll handle everything else.

Trouble is, every digital watch I buy has these four buttons that protrude from the side. They inadvertantly get pushed by clothing, machinery, wrists flexing, etc and evidently these ianimate objects have worked out the double-secret code for resetting everything on these watches from the alarm that beeps at 3 AM to getting your time in military format... only twelve hours off. Trust me, this design flaw exists across all brands and affects a lot of people. My son works in J C Penny's in the jewelry department and he says it's the number one complaint of people with digital watches. The guy in the cubicle next to me just beat his digital watch to death this morning and went out and bought a five dollar wind up. Me?

I bought a brand new digital watch. It lights up. It tells time, regular and military, It's water resistant. it plays games and it hass a built in chronograph...whatever that is. The alarm goes off at 10PM, just in time to tell me it's time for bed and it's sitting on my dresser and I'm confident in saying that my watch tells the correct time at least twice a day...somewhere in the world.