Unless your parents are really into watches and you get to learn and hear about mechanical timepieces at a very young age, there is a high chance that your first watch was a quartz watch. Correct? I think so.
At least for me the beginning was quartz. The oldest watch in my possession is this small Swatch. I don’t remember when exactly it was gifted to me, but I do remember that it in fact was a gift.
If I am not mistaken then I used this watch every day. I know that I wore it when I did a summer job at a construction company and I managed to scratch the watch “crystal” while carrying bags of cement and digging trenches. But that just shows how much I liked to wear this watch. Since it showed the time and when you were young and worked at construction then knowing when you had your lunch break and when you had to leave was crucial. Of course, unless your ultimate goal is to become a construction worker which for me it was not. I liked to be employed and to be able to experience hard labor, but that was it. My future, as we already know, was somewhere else.
Anyway. Now this watch sits at home in a watch box. I do pick it up from time to time just to look at it and to reflect that this at once was my watch that used to sit on my wrist on a daily basis.
I already wrote about my Seiko Solar quartz watch that my family gifted to me for my Master’s graduation. However, for my Bachelor’s graduation, they gifted me a nice dress quartz watch. It was not a Seiko. It had the brand name GANT (a clothing company).
You know. When it was gifted to me I was already into watches. I knew what a quartz watch was and how it differed from a mechanical watch. But even though I knew that mechanical watches were superior to quartz, I still wore it every day going to the university and after in Brussels while on my Schuman traineeship, and even after that I wore it going to work at a translation agency. And I liked it.
Watches to me are special. As of now, I don’t know whether I will buy watches simply because I like a watch and I have the means to buy it. Maybe someday I will. But today I like my watches that represent a meaning or a story of a part of my life. Like my Seiko shows me that I graduated and got a Master’s degree, my quartz shows my Bachelor’s degree and my ROAMER shows that I have the best woman and that I am now more than 30 years old.
Who knows. Maybe the next watch I get is going to be simply bought because I felt that I needed this watch in my life. Or, if I am patient enough, my next watch will represent a year lived in Brussels.
I will keep you posted.
Kind regards,
Olaaf
