You meet a mysterious old man at an obscure stall in the back of a flea market. He shows you a watch, and tells you it has a mystical power. When you pull the crown out and turn it to move the hands, you time travel in whatever direction you turn it. You can go forward or backwards minutes, hours, days, months, years even.
But there's a catch. If the watch stops, your life stops, so once you invoke the power your life is inextricably linked to the running of the watch. It's a vintage piece, a 70s Omega Constellation automatic. It looks well cared for and is running about -5s/day, but you can't take the back off to service it, and you don't know the service history, so you don't really know how much longer it will run. Do you take the journey through time?

 

Now I'm going to be distracted all day. I'll just turn back the hands by two minutes, so I never read this, and ...

Oops.

 

Not without movement photos!

 

Interesting scenario. Kind of The Monkey's Hand for watch lovers.

 

It’s funny that you felt the need to put “hypothetical” in the thread title!

 

There is an old Twilight Zone episode called "A Kind of a Stopwatch" where a man is given a stopwatch that when pressed the world stops, starting again when restarted. He finally decides to rob a bank and while hauling off the loot he drops the watch and breaks it, he has no ability to fix it.....time is frozen for him.

A Kind of a Stopwatch - Wikipedia

A 2 minute version of the episode:
(328) When Time Stands Still -- 2 Minute Twilight Zone -- A Kind of Stopwatch - YouTube

 

As long as it’s like my 70s Connie (a cal 564 C-case), I’d take the trip.

 

Sort of like the John D MacDonald book, The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything.

 

Invisibility! No ... flying!

 

Just turn time back once and you will know the future.

 

you beat me to it but I was going to say, only if it was a 60s Connie.

A 564 would be a good choice - except for the ease with which it is possible to accidentally move the date forward when pulling the crown out to change the hands - which would be a bit of a PITA if you time travelled every time you changed the watch.
A 561 might be a better choice - but not if you wanted to nip back to the previous evening’s 8.49pm and back again.

 

Yeah, you’re right! And I should add the disclaimer that mine really is a 60s-design Connie, and at 1970 production date only just qualifies. But hey, it’s my fantasy too.

 

Exactly that. Not that I'm an expert, but I'm fairly sure neither cal. 564 nor 1012 offered that feature, so I'm inclined to think they are trying to pass you a franken-connie, so probably overprized.

 

I get the impression that mechanical watches require service every three to five years, perhaps ten or more if sillicone lubes are used.
In any case the watch is likely to pack it in within a few years so you'd likely be trading the time travel function for a greatly reduced life span.
In my case I'm not likely to live past 80 any way so if I had any reasonable expectation of the watch running well for ten years or more I'd probably risk it.

Be a shame to find out too late that the watch hacks.

 

Glad to hear you'd live on the edge! One complication is that travelling any significant amount of time forward or backward would require quite a lot of turning the crown

 

Reminds me of the 1998 made for TV movie, the Clockmaker.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160139/