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A great tragedy has befallen me. I have just lost a faithful old companion that has been with me for 15 years. I am in mourning. Yes, I have broken my Mickey Mouse watch. No more will his tiny tail tell the time. No longer will I wake to his smiling face informing me I have overslept and should have been at work half an hour ago. For a week I suffered with no watch. It was pure hell. It is not as though I particularly need to know what the time is when I am at work; I am not paid by the hour, nor do I have a particular productivity rate to live up to. |
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I can take my lunchbreak whenever I wish, and since I often work late, I am not a clock-watcher. But being without the means to see time passing by distorts my perception of the whole day. Time seems to crawl by and what was only 5 minutes seems like 2 hours... then suddenly 45 minutes flashes past without pausing for breath. I find it impossible to pace my work and have no idea whether I am likely to get everything that needed to be done, done! Five days of this were enough. I had to buy a new watch. I didn't want a flash designer watch, colour co-ordinated to go with this week's hair colour. Nor did I want an exclusive expensive Swiss product costing more than a Porche. I had a choice. Should I play safe and purchase a nice, old-fashioned watch with two hands that rotate around a central spindle, pointing at numbers... you remember those? Of course you do, cast your mind back to your school days, with all that 'the big hand is on the 6, the little hand is on the 12, it must be lunchtime' stuff. Or should I be bold, be risky, and go for one of those new-fangled digital thingies? Watch makers don't make it easy, do they? The fashion these days seems to be for understated elegant watches, that look as if they have been carved out of a hunk of rock, with no numbers on, no markers at all - so how the hell are you supposed to know which way up it goes? You wake up in the morning, wonder whether it is time to go to work yet, and you haven't a clue whether it is twenty past seven or ten past one. Most confusing. So I bought this brilliantly clever digital watch. Well actually it is not called a watch, it is called an Alarm Chronograph. It is accurate to within 10 seconds a year. That's what the instruction say. So why do I have to keep altering the time? It appears to be gaining about 2 minutes every week - either that, or time is actually slowing down and the watch manufacturers haven't caught on yet. My new watch is also water proof. To a depth of 50 metres. Well that will come in really handy if East London ever floods! Anyway, if you are 50 metres underwater (whether through an accident or because you are attempting a Jacque Cousteau impression) you are hardly likely to be particularly interested in what the exact time is, now are you? You aren't going to have a train to catch. It also has a lot of extra features. You can choose whether to have the time displayed in 24 hour clock or boring old 12 hour clock. I do wish the Government would make up their minds which system we are going to use and stick to it, it gets so confusing having to convert backwards and forwards, with the Radio Times printing the telly schedules in 12 hour format, but my video requiring 24 hour programming. It takes me ages to convert the times in my head, programme the video, check the programming, find I am an hour out on one of the programmes, do it again... then I come home later to find I set the channel wrong and ended up with 3 bloody hours of football instead of that film I had been looking forward to seeing. My watch also has a stopwatch - presumably so I can time how long it takes me to programme the video correctly! Otherwise I can see absolutely no use for it at all. I don't jog (perish the thought!) so don't need it to time how fit I am. I am not in the least bit interested in knowing exactly how long I have just spent online; I prefer to have one big shock every quarter, when the phone bill arrives, rather than lots of little shocks every day, when I realise I have just spent 5 hours on a multi-player game! And, of course, it has an alarm. The alarm has two modes. I can set it to go off at a certain hour. Highly useful for timing eggs, but I don't like boiled eggs. Otherwise no use whatsoever since if I set it to remind me to be at a meeting at a certain time, invariably when it goes off I have forgotten what it was I was supposed to remember. And it is such a pathetic little squeaky alarm that I sleep right through it, so no point setting it to get me out of bed in the mornings. The other mode is that highly irritating one where it beeps every hour, just to tell you it's still alive. The person who put this function into watches should be shot! It is amazing that the weedy squeaky pathetic little bleep that wouldn't wake anyone, can suddenly sound so loud, so raucous, so un-ignorable, when it goes off in the middle of a tense scene at the theatre. How embarrassing! Everyone looks round, trying to identify the culprit, you try to look innocent but your bright red glowing blush gives you away as 100 pairs of angry eyes glare at you. Sometimes of course you get a chorus of different beeps, all slightly different pitches, one after another, as the hour strikes and the whole audience explodes in a cacophany of electronic chimes. Perhaps they should ban digital watches from theatres. Then there's this whole business of Greenwich Mean Time (is there a Greenwich Friendly Time, I wonder?) and British Summer Time, and the great switch between the two. Twice a year, the whole nation panics, people are an hour late (or early) for whatever appointments they had planned. It is all a bit sudden, isn't it... couldn't it be done a little more gradually? Like maybe a couple of minutes nibbled off every week? Maybe then I wouldn't have to keep altering my super-accurate digital watch! But, reliant as I seem to be on knowing the exact time at any moment, I never forget the ancient proverb: If you have one watch you always know what the time is. If you have two watches you never know what the time is. |
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