I've noticed an increasing trend towards verbosity in vintage watch sales ... a long spiel about the cultural background, the Cold War, nostalgic references etc etc. Increasingly seen in online dealer websites, and in ebay sales, and mostly amusing (though sometimes annoying).

Take this example from an online dealer

"A gentle sun shines on the city. Locals on their way to work mill about amid the cacophony of daily life. Above the fray, a man is just sitting down to his morning hot chocolate and croissant.


The morning’s papers lay in front of him, the ink on their pages still crisp and unsullied. With a mouthful of pastry, he surveys the headlines. The Americans, it seems, have managed to harness the power of the atom—this time in a nuclear-powered submarine, the world’s first.


With tensions on the rise between East and West, so soon after the last war, the image of this submarine silently slinking up and down the world’s coastlines is enough to give him pause. He swallows his croissant and turns the page. An ad catches his eye: it’s of a watch, elegant and gold—and, above all, thin."

And 6 more paragraphs like this before they even go on to describe the watch!

Any equally egregious examples that you guys have at hand?

 

Sickening stuff.

 

Stick to the facts. If I want to read a novel of have War and Peace!

 

I am actually excited to hear what happens to our protagonist. What happens after he reads the ad?????

For several minutes he examines the gold watch in the ad. He pulls up his sleeve, removes his own plain steel watch and lets his mind... he is suddenly interrupted by a dog pissing up his leg. Annoyed he quickly gets up but bumps into the waitress who spills coffee all over him. When trying to apologize he trips over the dog, falls and knocks over a table. The police are nearby and arrest him for drunk and disorderly. Great... all because of the stupid watch ad.

 

I suppose the dealer in question achieved a higher readership for the ad, than if he's just stuck to describing the watch. Maybe one person will get to the end and think they'd like to buy it...

A less flowery but equally annoying trend on eBay, is for sellers to put large blocks of template text about a watch family, with scant detail about the actual one they're selling - here's an example, from a guyPurchases made through these links may earn this site a commission from the eBay Partner Network who often has several Seiko Pogues for sale (in his defence, I have one that I got from someone who bought it from him, and it's a cracking example).

Still, rather too many words than the usual "look at the pictures, they form part of the description" cop out

 

Facts facts facts! Oh and the model number. Its easier to check the spec on the manufacturers site then. I'd passover a watch with waffle in the description as I'd think they were taking the p....doesn't make it genuine in my mind.

 

Lots of blurb, but the watch in the sales post isn't a Pogue. It may be "Pogue Style", but it ain't a Pogue.

 

He wakes up cursing his bruises the next day and files cases against the restaurant and police, for negligently-hot coffee and false arrest, respectively. The restaurant immediately makes a generous settlement offer because they know they purposely heat their coffee to 190 F because this dramatically reduces how much coffee they waste on refills when it doesn't stay hot at tables; it would cost them more to fight the case and have to change their practices for the long run. The police deny fault initially, but end up paying a large settlement to avoid trial after they find out that the pocket recorder that the waitress uses to get orders right captured the arresting officer refusing to listen to the waitress and two patrons trying to explain what happened and that the guy wasn't drunk.

The guy becomes friendly with the waitress and they get married on the second anniversary of the incident. They divorce for irreconcilable differences a year later. As soon as they were married, she divulged her true feelings that she actually considered the whole thing his fault in the first place, because it's dopey to wear wristwatches nowadays when everybody's always looking at cell phones every waking minute. She nagged him about it so much that he agreed to stop wearing them and to just sell them all. After a particularly bad day at work, he went to his old Omega AD just to look and ended up buying a Speedy, partly to impress the hot new salesperson. She'd inquired why he seemed so sad and he told her about his wife's attitude about watches and about his old Speedies. The salesperson responded that the Speedmaster is her favorite watch on men.

He felt very guilty and was afraid to ruin his marriage, so he kept it locked in his desk drawer and only wore it when his wife was out of town, and only at home with all the shades down. Once in a while, he lied to his wife about having to go out of town for work and wore his new Speedy to a hotel far enough away that he could safely wear it all weekend, even in restaurants and taking a walk through town. Nobody in the world knew about it besides us. Then, one day, he left his browser open to his popular thread "My Wife Hates Watches and Doesn't Know I Bought a New Speedy"

...And the morning papers were lying, not "laying" in front of him. [Pet peeve ]

I usually agree, but not in your case. If the watch really is such a "cracking example," then what he's selling is actually the watch described in that promo material, except it's used, which he disclosed. I have a problem with those types of listings when you ask and then (invariably) find out that the watch has some mechanical issues (or when the seller responds that he doesn't know and the sale is "as is"). In those cases, the seller is unknowingly actually warrantying every objective element of the promo language, such as whatever functional specs it includes. Those sellers don't realize that, of course, and the intention of what they think is just "puffery" is obviously meant to obfuscate and deceive. I once spoke to one of those guys (a very infrequent WUS poster) about a 911 Flightmaster that he had listed on eBay and asked him what "escapement" means. When he said he didn't know, I responded that it was in his description. He raised his voice very angrily and, basically, shouted at me something along the lines of "Yeah, I just copied that from the Omega website...so what?!!"

Re. the "pictures are part of the description" cop out, that does put the onus on buyers to check for any issues capable of being identified by a prudent visual examination of the photos. Anytime I see that, I specifically ask the seller if he knows of any specific defect that he thinks is depicted in any photo. If he says "no," then, there's no defect that he can later claim you should have noticed when you looked at them. But if there's a faint tool mark (for one example) that you didn't notice but that can be seen in a closer look at the photos, that cop out does cover him.

 

We might be splitting Pogue Hairs here, but I'd say that is more Poguey than most that get given the same monicker.

For the benefit of non-Pogue nerds (such as Jim & I), the one in the Ebay ad was a yellow faced 6139-6002, which was the model number sold outside of the US, and it doesn't say WATER 70M RESIST on the dial, which is because of its age. The actual Pogue was a (US model) 6139-6005 with serial number 190985, so produced in Sept 1971, hence why the dial says Resist - earlier than about mid/late 1970, it would have said WATER 70M PROOF, and later than about mid/late 72 it wouldn't have had anything. I've got several "Proof" dialled watches that are 6139-6000, were made earlier than the True Pogue, and in fact are not yellow dials. But they're still Pogues

It's the same as saying a Moonwatch is only a Moonwatch if its exact same model actually went to the Moon...

 

When a seller claims that pictures form part of the description, I naturally assume they're either selling something that they've no clue about (so, if there's a fault, how would they be expected to know about it), or they're deliberately concealing pertinent information. In both cases, I'm wont to take my business elsewhere...

 

Sometimes good to get some feeling words, to learn about the seller, but not that much!
Don’t forget the sign “we buy the seller first”

 

I use to do some copy-writing. I did some for Samsonite and Louis Vutton and my god, the more nonsensical it sounded, all the better.

 

Its also got an aftermarket dial. Known as a 'feiko'.

 

Well let’s face it, watch collecting is a bit odd anyway, so if someone wants to get lyrical/poetic, then that’s just adding more colour to the oddness....

However, if the descriptions are too long, perhaps we should start a Haiku thread? These guys had a go already, surely we can do better?

http://forums.watchuseek.com/f71/watches-haiku-1668546.html#/topics/1668546

 

Jeez Louise! You guys don't enjoy a little build up? You remind me of the guys that scream "Take it off! Take it all off!" during the sermon in church...

 

Some epic thread drift here, part of what I loooove about Omegaforums...

 

Good grief. It's like Walter Pater waxing poetic about the Mona Lisa.

Here's one sentence of his description:

"She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."

 

There's a simple explanation for the excess storytelling. The Seinfeld show was cancelled, therefore J. Peterman was out of a job, so he now writes watch listings freelance.

 

Damn this west coast time zone, i've only just gotten to read this and you beat me to the J. Peterman thing by 2 hours

 

I haven't been to a house of religious worship of any kind since I was a kid. I do spend time at strip clubs fairly regularly, but never yell anything at anybody on stage because I'm perfectly fine with buildups. I think the issue here is that unlike a narrative history of the watch, the "buildup" has absolutely nothing to do with the watch itself, which is why some of us may find it annoying.