I’ve been a fan of watches for as long as I can remember, back to a young child. I remember my brother and I each having our own digital Star Wars watches, my was C3-PO and his Darth Vader. That is my earliest watch memory and must have been in the late 1070’s. In the 80’s I can remember wearing a Casio digital, I think I went through a couple of those. From there until the mid 90’s it’s really a blur. I know that I always wore a watch, in fact being on time was important to me; not sure where that got put into my head.
It was in the mid 90’s when I really began to take notice of other, more expensive watches. By more expensive I mean over $100. I don’t think I spent that much on a watch until into late in the 90’s. Anyway, in around 1996 or so I notice my father in-law had on a very cool Citizen watch. It was analog and digital and could tell the time in 30-something cities around the world, had an alarm, chronograph, UTC, and could even swap the times between the analog and digital with the push of a button or two! It was cool as hell. My wife at the time bought me one in 1997 and it became my daily wear watch for a good four years or better. It was not until later in 2002 that I discovered the world of watches on the internet.
It was shortly after we had moved to Boston in August of 2002 that I got on-line and really started to see that there was a lot more out there than I thought. In fact there was a whole world of affordable mechanical watches that until then I had been completely unaware of; I only thought manufactures like Rolex still made automatic watches. How little I knew! My first experiences were with fakes, unfortunately, before I moved on to genuine pieces. It was late in 2002 when I first found the Poor Man’s Watch Forum, at the time it was still part of Watch-U-Seek. It later broke out onto its own and I found it again in February of 2003, I have been posting there ever since. In June of 2004 I was named WIS of the Month (WOTM) (WIS = Watch Idiot Savant) and a little later I was asked by the forum founder, Reto, to join the Admin team for the forum.
My collecting habits have changed over the past five years. I’ve tried to be more careful about my purchases, meaning less impulse buys and putting more thought into things. If you look through my sold items you’ll see a lot that were impulse buys. The ones I’ve thought about, I mostly still have. I have a couple things in mind for my next buy, generating the cash is always the problem, especially since I’m happy with my gang the way it is right now.
Anyway, I have the site broken down into four sections:
- Current Watches are the watches I own right now, none are for sale, thanks for asking!
- Sold Watches are those that have come and gone in the past 5 years.
- Watches In Movies & TV is a collection of screenshots from movies and TV of various watch appearances. It’s updated as often as I either take screencaps or get them sent, so check back from time to time!
- Watch Blog Posts are those posts from my blog related to watches. Some are reviews, some are ramblings, all are watch related. A popular one is my visit in April of 2006 to the Montana Watch Company.
- Watches on my Radar is a page mostly for me to keep track of those watches I’d one day like to own.
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