The half-million-euro watch

If you manage to get a child to lift their eyes from the tablet screen, the video game console or the TV and pay attention to you for five minutes, even if only partially, try to explain to them that, in the eighties and nineties, when you started to grow up, you were given a wristwatch as a gift. If you manage to keep this child we mentioned from telling you off with an "OK, boomer" because, for whatever reason, you have sparked at least a bit of curiosity, you can tell them that this first watch was usually given for the first communion. Also that, even though parents, grandparents or godparents would spend a lot of money at the jewelry store to buy you an Omega, Seiko or Citizen with a leather strap or stainless steel, when you opened the case containing the gift you experienced a secret disappointment because, in reality, what you wanted was a modern C-80 calculator watch. As incredible as it may seem to this hyper-technological kid listening to you, children back then were absolutely fascinated by a gadget that Casio released to the market in 1980 and that seemed straight out of a science fiction movie: a wristwatch that, besides telling the time, incorporated the basic functions of a calculator. Amazing, really.

Childhood traumas aside –I was never given the Casio calculator watch–, when I was little, owning your first wristwatch came with a strong symbolic weight. You started to be the owner of your time, but on the other hand you also became its slave. Do you understand what I mean? When adults told you that you could go out until seven this gave you a certain degree of autonomy, although you could no longer play carelessly until they called you, but had to check the watch every so often so you wouldn't miss the time. Time: you start worrying about whether you still have time to play one more game with your friends before it's seven and, suddenly, you've grown up and asking yourself if you still have time or if you're already late takes on a much deeper meaning. Anyway.

The 21st-century child thinks that, luckily, now, when you get older, you no longer get a wristwatch as a gift but an iPhone that, in addition to telling the time and having a calculator, also serves to keep your annoying parents calmer when you leave home. It annoys me a bit, but I must admit that this child I invented to write this article is absolutely right: the smartphone has made the wristwatch dispensable. It is our wristwatch. In the same way that it is also our calculator, recorder, flashlight, road map, and many other things. However, paradoxically, this has not led to the ruin of watchmakers. On the contrary! One only needs to walk through the most elegant streets of Barcelona and see that many people, especially men, spend real fortunes on wristwatches: Rolex, Cartier, Audemars Piguet, Longuines, Patek Philippe, Tissot, Tag Heuer, Hublot... The watchmaking business, especially luxury watchmaking, continues to be a booming business. Why?

Status. For people with money or who want to appear to have it, the watch is a great status symbol that they can display, on any occasion, tied to their wrist. It certainly is for the gentleman from whom, a few days ago, three thieves stole, in the middle of a Barcelona street, a watch valued at no less than 500,000 euros. Fortunately, especially for him, he was able to recover such a precious object the next day, thanks to a joint operation by the Mossos d'Esquadra and the National Police.

Needless to say, I want to live in a city where you can walk around calmly with a half-million-euro watch on your wrist, if you feel like it and can afford it. But perhaps it should be remembered that, no matter how much you can buy a watch valued at thousands of euros, time is what really counts, and it is priceless.