Wrist Watches & Body clocks

I am one of those who likes to wear his wrist watch 24 hours of the day. Except when I am having a bath. Without it I feel lost. And I have this `compulsive obsessive disorder` of looking at my watch every few minutes. A habit which has got me into trouble with a few clients in my long career as an advertising professional.

 I remember once a client admonishing me for this habit. “ Stop looking at your watch all the time……. I want your total attention to what I am saying, If you have to go somewhere please tell me,  we will call off this meeting”. He was really angry. Sheepishly I removed the watch from my wrist and put it into my shirt pocket. Though I apologised, I was finding it extremely difficult to control my urge to pull the watch out of my pocket.

A friend of mine who was in the audience at a meeting I was addressing mentioned to me that he found my habit of constantly looking at the watch during the talk not only distracting but very irritating. I smiled and told him `Habits die hard”

I have a set of three watches which I wear in rotation every few weeks. Imagine my panic when I recently discovered   that not only had the wrist watch I was wearing stopped working, but the spare ones had also stopped. I was listless. In my desperation I rummaged through all the discarded watches kept in a box in my drawer.  While none of the automatics were working I found to my great joy that the first manually operated `Enicar` watch I had owned from my college days started working as soon as I wound the key. Though it was in a really bad shape, look wise, I didn`t care. I immediately wore it and kept it on until I went to a watch repair shop to get one of my regular watches functional.

Another interesting experience I have relates to my  body clock, which most people would have experienced in their life time. In the old days I was a user of the regular alarm clock for  waking me up in the mornings at a fixed time. These days I use my mobile for the same purpose. But I invariably wake up five minutes before the scheduled alarm time. My body clock in action! Once I woke up late to find that not only  the alarm clock had stopped working (or maybe I had failed to hear the alarm) but my body clock too had failed. I discovered that my wrist watch was not on my wrist. Obviously it had fallen off during my sleep. Looks like my body clock failed to work in the absence of the watch on my wrist!!

Most of the younger generation don`t seem to wear wrist watches because they can see the time on their mobiles. I however, find  it easy to look at my watch than at my mobile for checking time.  I have a fetish for time management and my wrist watch is my life line to maintain my reputation as a person who always keeps his time commitments

I think I will add a clause in my will that my family should not remove the watch from my  wrist when they  are taking me on my last journey. You see, I don`t want to be late for my meeting with the LORD!

This article appeared in Adyar Times issue dt 4-10^th February,2018 under my column `Rajan`s  Random Reflections``