G-Shock life

Not your typical double-wrist watch shot, but a double-watch wrist shot!

That’s what you do when your wife hands you her G-Shock while she powerlifts her personal best weights :)

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Photo of a man's wrist on which there are two black Casio G-Shock watches, one larger and one smaller. In the background of the photo is a barbell with weights on it.

I Buy Another Watch

Exciting news! I've bought myself another watch :)

This news is exciting because I love watches – not as pieces of jewellery, but as gadgets that tell the time. I always need/want to know what time it is and, as a result, have been wearing a wrist watch almost every day since the early 80s.

Why another watch?

Why buy a second watch when I already have a perfectly good watch that I love and wear all the time? 

Two reasons:

First, the watch I have right now is too thick to fit comfortably under the cuff of my work shirts. As you can see in the picture below, the watch on the left, which is my current watch, is much thicker (16mm) than the watch on the right (8.6mm), which is my new one.

Now, because my current watch is so thick, for the last year and a half, I have actually not been wearing it to work every day. I know! Crazy, right? Fortunately, I carry two smartphones with me all the time so, even though I’ve been without a watch at work, I have always been able to keep track of the time.

Second, well…let me put it this way: Where is the one place you can't use a smartphone to tell the time? In an airplane, of course – specifically during take-off and landing. And what company do I work for now? Oh, yes, an airline.

So what happened to me last month? I flew to Sydney for work and, for two extended periods of time (well, at least they felt like extended periods of time), I was chronologically disadvantaged because I'd had to turn my phones off and had forgotten to wear my bulky-but-still-functional watch to work that day.

What then?

Scarred by that experience, I decided to look for a nice, cheap, simple, and, importantly, thin watch that I could wear to work. Obviously, I was only going to look at Casio watches.

Unfortunately, there are no Casio outlets in Melbourne so I was stuck with the limited selection on display at Angus & Coote and Thomas Jewellers on Bourke Street in the CBD. Neither of them had what I wanted so I went to trusty old Amazon.com to see what I could find.

That was when I discovered that online retailers sell most Casio watches at about a third of the price that local brick-and-mortar retailers sell them at. Wow. I am never buying a watch from a local brick-and-mortar retailer again.

Anyway, here is my original short list from Amazon (my current watch is in the top left hand corner):

Yes, I get a little obsessive when it comes to buying gadgets. Especially those I’ll be using frequently for a number of years. Heck, I wouldn’t even be writing this blog post if I wasn’t that obsessed with this stuff!

Finally, after getting Nadia's preferences, I made my decision and placed my order. As it happens, Amazon ended up being just the front-end for this purchase because my actual order was placed with the appropriately named MrWatch.

A few days later, through the mysterious powers of FedEx, I had my new watch :) 

So, what did I get?

The watch I bought is a Casio MTP-1309L-8BV. (Yes, that’s quite a mouthful.)

It’s simple, good looking, and, fits very comfortably under the cuff of all my work shirts.

Of course, this is the first analogue watch I’ve had in years so using it to tell the time is taking a little getting used to. I can’t just take a quick peek at one part of it, for example. I have to look at the entire watch face before I can tell what time it is. Not that this difficult to do, of course. I’m just not used to doing it.

I am liking its leather strap, though. And I am enjoying the sight of the second hand as it spins around the clock face.

So, “yaay!” for my new watch and my ability to comfortably keep track of time while wearing a business shirt during take-off and landing. (Hmmm…my reason for getting this watch sounds a lot less impressive when you put it that way.)

My New Casio Watch

I love Casio watches and, since the early 80s, haven’t bought anything other than a Casio for myself. (I’ve also never bought anything other than a Casio calculator but that’s another blog post.)

When the battery on my latest watch started to die for the second time a couple of weeks ago (I’d owned this one for about 5 years) I figured it was time for me to buy a new one.

28 years of Casio Watches

But, before I get to that, here’s a quick trip down memory lane of the Casio watches that I remember owning over the years (thanks to Watch Shock and their awesome watch archive).

I owned this watch when I was six or seven years old (i.e. in the early 80s):

And this one some years later:

I then got this fabulous calculator watch in the early 90s (which I loved dearly):

Through the rest of the 90s I owned G-Shock watches; first this one:

And then this one:

Finally, in the mid 00s, I got myself a ProTrek:

My New, Simple Watch

My newest Casio is one of their basic models (the AE-2000W) which really just tells the time (though it does do that across 31 time zones):

I bought this simpler type because I don’t use my watch as often as I used to. That’s mainly because the ProTrek was too bulky to wear under business shirts so I couldn’t wear it to work every day. This new one isn’t much thinner but I’ll certainly give it a try.

That said, I do still wear my watch whenever else I’m out of the house and I do keep it next to my pillow every night.

And now I have this shiny new one to help me keep track of my day :)