A Watch, Not a Phone

The young ones laugh at the watch. They have a phone that does everything — time, maps, the lot — and they cannot understand why a man would strap a wind-up relic to his wrist when the future is sitting in his pocket. I let them laugh. Then I ask them where they were last Tuesday at half past nine, and whether they could prove they were anywhere else.

Three jobs, one piece of brass

A watch tells time. That sounds too obvious to say until you are standing at a REDACTED corner waiting on a brush contact who is precise to the minute, and your phone is dead, and the thing on your wrist does not care. A meet that runs on a timetable — and the good ones do — needs a clock that does not depend on a battery or a signal. Niner zero fife means niner zero fife. The watch keeps that appointment even when everything electronic has quit on you.

A watch is a compass. Point the hour hand at the sun, bisect the angle between it and twelve, and you have your north-south line — rough, but rough is all I have ever needed. The sun runs your bearings all day if you let it, and the watch reads the sun. I have walked out of more than one unfamiliar district by the hour hand and a tall building I could see from far off, eyes up, head level, while a man beside me drove us into a dead end because the little blue arrow on his screen lied.

And a watch holds value quietly. A decent steel piece is barter you wear in the open. Nobody searches your wrist. I have settled a debt with a watch on a bad night near REDACTED when nothing else in the room was worth carrying.

The part the phone gets wrong

Here is the thing the phone people miss. Every job the watch does, the phone does louder. The phone is not a clock that happens to talk to the network. It is a beacon that occasionally tells you the time. While it sits idle in your pocket it is negotiating with three towers, and the overlap of their measurements pins you — to a kilometre in open country, to twenty metres in a city. That is a record of where you stood, kept by somebody who is not you, available to anyone who asks the system the right way.

A watch keeps no record. It has never once told a tower where I was. It does not know my name, my route, or my habits, and it cannot give them up under pressure, because there is nothing in it to give.

So I carry both, the way I carry both kinds of money. But I do not confuse them. The phone is for the network's convenience and occasionally mine. The watch is for me. When the gear fails — and gear fails — the thing on your wrist is still working, still silent, still keeping the appointment.

The tool that shouts your position is not a clock. The clock is the quiet thing on your wrist.

Names changed, the rest moved a town or two over. The lesson is exactly true.

— M.