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Harry jenkins
·I made a mistake. I am sure I will one day get over it, but I’m not one hundred percent sure that day will come. Well, I’m sure it will but I’ll sure be salty for a while. I learned a lesson, perhaps some younger member here will happen upon this text and learn it before learning it the hard way. I’m not going to name names or name types of watch but suffice to say I am personally interested in old watches (1910’s to 1940’s). Civilian and military. The watch in question was a military watch of great historical importance from a significant world war. Well, I guess all world wars are significant but you get my ambiguous drift. Unlike some military watches of the past, this one really was a rarity. Years of searching various online watch buying platforms has produced precisely zero instances of this watch and none that sold before my time went at what I would call an ‘affordable’ price. Thats not to say I haven’t come across one or two but they have always been in the $5000-$6000 price range. Now, that price for this particular watch is one that I feel is rather inflated but thats probably because I’m cheap or I want the watch but I don't want it ‘$5000’ much. I wear my historical watches and as a man who has yet to own a wicked good modern watch (something I’d like to do one day) one must consider ones purchases carefully. A man of my means cannot afford to go on some historical horological crusade as though he were a watch museum with endless funding, preserving history as moral duty at any cost. As much as it is my impulse, I cannot collect each and every staple of old military watches and include all of their sometimes trivial variations, but there are some I must one day acquire because to me, they are special. The watch I am talking about was one of those watches but, as I said earlier, $5000-$6000 is too much given its present day application, appearance and functionality when compared to other potential purchases of the same price range which fare better in those departments. Yes, if I were a tech mogul, a royal, or the man who manufactures the balls in ball point pens for the world, I would spend that sum without blinking an eye, but I’m not. I will briefly also touch upon the fear I live in that older collectors than me already had much more time than I did to find these watches, in better condition and at better prices and that every day as a historical watch enthusiast feels like time is running out, for all examples will surely find wrists and never leave them - this feeling is particularly exacerbated the older the watch in question is. Anyway, after some more reading up and drooling over them, I resign to the fact that one may never show at a more reasonable price and that I may have to just wait until I am more accomplished or have lifetime’s worth of disposable income to blow in my very distant retirement. I had been searching for about two years on a popular watch vending website to no avail. I decide to enter the name of the watch into my search alerts and call it an indefinite wait. To my absolute shock, two weeks later, two weeks after actually adding the watch to the search alerts, one shows up. What are the chances? Its not in bad condition. Hell, I’d just be happy to own one. It was listed at about a fifth, 1/5 of what I had seen those few I had seen in my life, go for. I begin a dialogue with the seller, a very nice man who understood customer service and was polite and answered my questions. I asked for movement pictures as there weren’t any on the listing, he said he’d help me out in a few days as he was away currently. Then, I panicked. I remember having read in a forum somewhere that despite the age of this watch, people somewhere had started manufacturing quite good fakes and were selling them. I realised I didn’t really know enough about the watch to make what felt like an informed decision to spend a significant $1000 on relic that might turn out to be a fake. The paranoid cynic in me was loud. If it was a fake, the ageing was well done, not impossible though. After all, this is maybe the second time I’ve seen one listed online and it was definitely unusually cheap, going by previous price listings. I contacted a person who is a real authority on these watches, a person I’d had some brief but good natured watch related interactions prior and I sent him a screen shot. A couple of things about the case back didn't make sense to my fairly layman eyes, so I asked him some questions and he very kindly answered. I explained I was worried about the bootleggers of these watches and that I had thought perhaps this one might have been one of those still in circulation. So, case back question answered, the watch seems legitimate. Then begins the mandatory internal wrestle with myself about wether I can afford the $1000, do I deserve to spend the $1000? Have I achieved anything notable or decent lately that warrants another addition? How can the timing of the listing be so good and so bad simultaneously? If I buy it, what can I sell to justify it? Am I addicted? Do these watches actually frequent this particular website and I have just been missing them because I only just recently put it in my search alerts and prior to that had been manually searching in the evening for two years which still allowed for 12 hours in which listings might materialise and be quickly sold on the same day before I even know they existed? Is the watch that cool looking and historically important? Yes. The gentleman selling the watch returns the movment pictures. Now the watch is undeniably legitimate. I thank him and tell him I’m very interested in this watch. Turns out I’m supposed to take work trip that week. Its one of those work trips that I would say is not directly related to work but is one during which work related non-work will take place. I don't really want to go but like many industries mine is one where in order to stay employed certain undeclared obligations must be obliged. I figure I should do everything in my power to become the man who can click the ‘purchase watch’ button without a surge of self doubt. The work trip means I stand to protect and maybe with a little luck possibly expand my income in the future and that the guilt of blowing $1000 on another objectively superfluous item may shrink in the future. Anyway, the plane ride takes about 15 hours. Im out for a couple of days. I figure when I arrive I’ll hook up to the internet and buy the watch. When I get my act together and get online I find a message from the historical watch specialist I told you about asking me if I was the one selling the watch I had sent him a picture of. He said he had found it listed on that popular watch vending website. Thats because the picture I sent him had the watermark of that popular watch vending website embedded into it. I go the popular watch vending website. I go through my messages there to find the nice man who was selling that watch. I click the listing link. It says ‘reserved’ underneath. ‘Its okay’, I think, ‘I’ll just talk to the nice gentleman selling the watch and he’ll remember me, we seemed to have such a great rapport blah blah blah’. So I message him saying I’m ready to purchase. He immediately responds notifying me that he has sold it to that watch specialist I was telling you about. I hurl profanity at myself for missing what was not only a rare find but an unbeatable price for such a find. I message the watch specialist who is an expert on these watches, I ask if I can buy it from him. He says he has collectors lined up. He does, very kindly, say that if they fall through, he’d remember me, but that wont happen because he knows I’ll never pay $5000-$6000 for something I know cost him $1000. So there you have it. The real bummer for me is this man already owns many of these watches. Business is business I guess. He got there first and its fair. I just wanted to wear the damn thing. Its cool as hell. I don't know what the moral of the story is. Don't sleep on old watches? More is lost to indecision than poor decision? When seeking advice from experts of rare old watches, don’t use pictorial attachments that link them to the actual active listings of the rare old watches they specialise in? Something ‘too good to be true’ usually is but sometimes isn’t? Expect bad karma when entertaining the idea of purchasing a watch from someone who clearly doesn't know the value of what they have? I should have bought it as soon as I saw it. What an idiot.
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