Omega

guru_4_hire
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My first gentlemans watch - and it has a story

So about 9 years ago I was a young man in the US Army working in a joint enterprise with some russians in the UN mission to Kosovo.  A simple past time of young GIs thrust together with counterparts from other places is to trade everything for anything.  So I traded a pair of US army cold weather boots for a "russian" watch.  I did this twice.  The actual russian paratrooper watch has since gotten lost, but this one ended up in a little grey box that kept miscellanious mens junk: cuff links, old keys, a money clip, the detritus of a young mans life that just isnt quite toss out material.  Being 19 and not exactly what you would call cosmopolitan I did not really realize what an Omega watch was.  So it has been residing in a small grey box in the bottom of my underwear drawer for at least 8 years.

In any case, I decided the other day that it was time that I had a grown up watch and not one of those 40 dollar generic plastic LED watches, or cereal box watch, but a real gentlemans watch.  I thought a pocket watch would be cool, and different enough to fulfill my desperate internal yearnings to be just a bit different in an increasingly homogenized world.  I remembered that I had a cheap one that I had bought some time ago and decided to go looking through my various boxes of stuff.  So I cracked open my little grey box and pulled out this wristwatch, and looked at the face.  It was an Omega.  Well, my word, who would have thought i had anything nice.  So I wound it up, and bought a new leather band (the original is in a little ziploc plastic bag I got from the jewelers). 

That night it stopped working so I had to drop it off this morningat the horologist (a really fun word to say), so for a fairly reasonable sum it is being serviced, getting a new crystal and mainspring and the what-not.  The gentleman who ran this absolutely charming little boutique for various men's accessories, was a very interesting fellow, and we talked for a half hour.  He attempted to look up this particular face on this particular model, but had no luck.  So it appears that not only did I find a little treasure that I had completely forgot about but its something unique too.  I can hardly wait to get it back in a couple of weeks.

Due to the uniqueness of the watch I was originally concerned it was a knock off, so I took a small screw driver i had and a little hammer and tapped off the back plate.  (due pass out, please)  The jewelers I took it too, to buy a band, were the kind of pretentous and the kind of jerks that would charge you a ridiculous sum of money for what amounts to 5 min of effort.  Before I was going to invest any money in what was likely a junk watch, I wanted to find out what was going on with it.

In any case here are some pictures:

In any case, I love the pure simplicity of it.  There isn't anything there to distract from its primary purpose.  A device dedicated to the pure art of telling time; Graceful and elegant but lacking in pretension.  I absolutely love it.