What it's really like to own a vintage watch...

Owning a vintage watch is amazing, but if your last name is not Clymer or Mayer, the road to enjoyment can be a little bumpy. It’s late, you’ve had three beers, and it’s time to get on eBay. You find a sweet watch, make a respectable bid, and then go to bed. In the morning, you see an email from eBay indicating you’ve won (shit, what have I done). Sweet [maybe]! The seller is a good one (more on this later), so you get the watch a couple days later. The first thing I like to do with a vintage watch [or any watch for that matter] is unscrew the crown (no pun intended), wind it, set the date and time, size the bracelet, and then set to wearing this sweet sweet thing of ole, that may have been worn by a service member, or maybe worn in a Deepthroat spoof – this watch did not come with provenance, but it’s cool-as-fuck. You wear your “new” watch all day and go to bed. In the dead of the night, you check the lume in the pitchest black possible, and you see that familiar Tritium glow, or maybe even a radium glow – hopefully you’re not giving your face cancer falling back to sleep with your hand under your pillow. In the morning, that’s when it gets awesome – the watch has stopped sometime in the night, like an hour after you checked it at 2am. Ugh, so, damn, what do you do? What I typically do is give the watch a full wind and wear it a second day. With a vintage watch, the movement may be functioning decently, and maybe it will hold a full-wind and run for a solid vintage-ish power reserve of like 26 hours. No big deal – when you have a few other watches, you know you are only going to wear this one a day or two at a time. If, on day two, the watch just doesn’t run, it’s more than just the self-winding mechanism, then it’s time to contact the seller to discuss your options (like, he’s a watch dealer with a watchmaker handy so he will service it for you whilst also covering your return shipping). In my most recent eBay purchase, the watch would tick when my hand was still but not when it was moving, so, back it went. They always say, buy the seller, and that motto gets you to a point. If you want real sick deals on watches no one else is willing to purchase [because the seller is really no one – like, just a dude selling a watch on eBay with a few other random pairs of jeans], then do it (or don’t, and leave them all for me), because the best thing about eBay is that, if the seller says the watch “runs fine”, and if you get it and it “doesn’t run at all”, then simply ask the seller to right the situation, and if he says “no, I said no returns in my listing”, just submit a claim with eBay, send them pics or a video of what’s wrong compared to the sellers listing, and eBay will make it right. It’s an actual guarantee. Man-up and create a bad ass watch collection. Fuckin’ a.