When "can't afford the time" really means can't afford the time

Smartphones are killing the watch industry | New York Post

"Chanel, for one, is investing more heavily in its entry-level line of watches, known as the Boy.Friend, that sell for $4,000 to $8,000."

And yeah, I know four grand is cheap for a high-end watch. Just read the ads in the New Yorker.

But me, I’m more of a Timex guy. As far as I can tell, cheap minutes are about the same length as really expensive ones—or is that the other way around? It’s true we spend a whole lot of money keeping accurate time—atomic clocks and so forth—which is necessary for certain things like, for example, running this network, but there’s nothing in the rulebook that says time has to be kept in “minutes” and “hours”—it could just as well be peanuts and butterflies. In fact, sometime back in the 90’s, the watchmaker Swatch tried to market a new decimal-based timekeeping system that used “beats” for minutes and had the entire globe functioning in just one time zone (a concept that more or less lost its meaning in Swatch’s plan)—but the whole project failed because I was the only one who took part in it.

Time is a thing, all right (see Einstein) but keeping track of it is arbitrary at best. I once saw a women interviewed on TV who objected to Daylight Saving Time because it wasn’t God’s time. The Interview took place in Georgia and the God’s Time she was referring to was Eastern Standard. Keep that in mind if you live on the left coast.

I had a pocket watch just like my Dad’s when I was a kid, then got a wristwatch as a high school graduation present. You don’t see pocket watches around much any more, but the way you tell real bluejeans from imposters is still looking to see if they have a watch pocket (the real ones do). My graduation watch, which probably cost thirty or forty bucks in the Money of the Ancients, was undoubtedly the most expensive watch I ever owned.

I still have several cheap wristwatches lying around somewhere but none of them work because their batteries are dead. One of them is an Apple watch marked “Think Different” which runs backward. I wore it for quite some time, until I started having trouble reading time in the regular way. My classes were getting disorganized because the clock in the computer lab ran forward.

It turns out, however, that except for the fact they’re different, backward minutes and forward minutes are the same.

Some people set their clocks a little bit ahead to avoid being late to appointments and then are late because they think they have more time than they do. But let’s not get into that. In my sister’s house there is a time zone for every room.

So a decade or so ago I ran across an old-fashionedy pocket-style watch in a drug store somewhere and, seized by an attack of retro, almost bought it—but then remembered I had a phone in my pocket that told me the time for free, if I didn’t count what it cost. And I’ve been doing that ever since—using my phone as a timepiece (see above). 

The only difference is that it—especially the one I have now, which is approximately the size of the Sunday New York Times—no longer fits in the watch pocket of my real jeans.