My First Watch
My first watch was made in Switzerland! And I hated it with the short-sighted stupidity only a teenager is capable of!
Turning 13 in 1993, I think I was the last generation in which the top gift demanded by a teenager was their own watch. After Windows 95, it was the computer. Then cellphones. Then gaming consoles. Then smartphones, tablets, etc.
But when I turned 13, it was watches that were the status symbol at school. Every other day, someone was showing off their new watch. Often digital. This is also when manufacturing of digital watches became cheap enough that digital watches were now for the common consumer, not just the tech savvy high income person with the high end Casio watches.
I demanded a watch from my parents and grandparents. Ideally a digital watch because that was the peak of technology for us back then. But my parents weren't ones to buy stuff for us that easily.
So my grandmother gave me a watch the was once owned by my great grandfather. A genuine Swiss watch. Henri Sandoz! I can still see and feel it! It was a winding watch. No batteries. You just wind the tiny knob every night.
The stupid entitled teenager that I was, I treated the watch with derision! What is this nonsense of winding it every night when one small battery the size of a button can keep digital watches going for years? Are we in the stone age?
Finally a year or so later, either I wore my parents down and they bought me a digital watch. Or I saved money from grandparent gifts and bought one. I forget exactly which. But soon, I was the proud owner of a plastic digital watch with fancy futuristic gray screens instead of that archaic old fashioned windup Swiss watch.
I wonder where that Henri Sandoz watch is today. Probably in some forgotten corner of a drawer or shelf.