Quote Originally Posted by stickman View Post
Know what you mean about losing your watch. I bought a really nice watch in China instead of numbers for the hours it had the Chinese zodiac.
Similar (but very different) story: In my working career I was a nephrologist (kidney doctor). In the USA, permanent kidney failure entitled one to our "age-based" variety of National Health Insurance, beginning in 1973 because of the enormous cost of permanent hemodialysis treatments and kidney transplantation. Payments to the facilities that provided the treatments were too generous, and the Stanford University-trained people who ran some of the first non-hospital based dialysis centers came up with novel ways to benefit the patients. For example, travel was virtually impossible for those folks, because they needed the lengthy treatments 3 times weekly. The idealistic center operators negotiated special deals with cruise ship companies to allow their clients to take cruises to Caribbean islands and Alaska (they could do their treatments on the ships but have free time on the visited islands). I provided the medical care services for a few of those trips, and during one, the battery on my "el-cheapo" Timex calculator watch died, meaning I couldn't count pulse rates/heart rates. So, on Grand Cayman Island (tax haven) I went into a watch shop and asked for a battery change. "SIR!!!" announced the haughty salesperson; "we do NOT deal with toys!"

I was raised in Michigan's VERY rural "Upper Peninsula," > 300 miles from the nearest large city. My mom grew up on a Nebraska farm, but loved her own time in that big city (Chicago) so much that she longed for cosmopolitan cultural exposure. She had a subscription to The New Yorker, and by the time I was five I would page through each week's issue, reading virtually nothing, but marveling at full-page ads for the bizarre (the original VW Beetle), the enormously expensive (Rolls Royce and Bentley sedans), incredibly expensive but elegant clothing (Brooks Brothers), and the Swiss "Movado Museum Watch" (incredibly thin, with NO numerals or characters on its face, just gold filling on the two hands, NO second hand, and a gold dot at 12 o'clock) Supposedly, they called it the "Museum Watch" because one was displayed in New York's Museum of Modern Art).

Fast forward almost 30 years, and in that shop where I was treated with such disdain, I actually SAW one of those watches. I was immediately smitten, and bought one. It was essentially useless in patient care (no second hand), and back home, I wore it rarely (too expensive; perhaps once a year I'd pull it out for some formal occasion, and on those rare occasions, IT required a new battery; they were rare AND expensive. And, eventually it required a new movement. The per-cost wearing was extraordinary.

Fast forward another 40 years, and I was walking with my son in Midtown Manhattan, by now attempting to learn about Highland Clothing and tartan, and we encountered a "Brooks Brothers" storefront. "HEY!" I said to my son. "We HAVE to go in there. They have their own TARTAN, designed expressly for them and listed in the Scottish Registry of Tartans. So, in we went. Essentially NO ONE in the store had a clue what I was asking. The explanation? Brooks Brothers was no longer the exclusive retailer of bespoke clothing it had been in the 1950s; it's name was all that remained, and even THAT had been sold a few times in just the previous year or three.

I still HAVE that watch, but it still hides in a drawer far more often than I wear it.