A voice squeeks behind me, in line, "Excuse me. What time is it?"
I turn, and am stunned by a smokin' hot girl in her twenties with long, black hair, high heels, and a mini skirt that calls attention to her gorgeous legs. Instead of telling her what time it is, I swing my arm to the left and upside down, so that she can see my watch as if she was looking at a watch on her own wrist.
She stares at my watch, a Seiko SKX 781: the famous "Seiko Orange Monster" professional dive watch.
I have no plans to dive down to 200 meters below the surface, but if that ever happens, I'm wearing the right watch.
She stares at the watch.
She squints.
She leans closer.
Her eyes bulge.
She then straightens up, and huffs indignantly, "I can't read it! I can't see what time it is!"
I realized right away what her problem was: she has never studied a dive watch with a rotating bezel that helps you keep track of time.
Don't get me wrong: I'm sure her dad wears a Rolex Submariner, but she has never really looked at it.
She shrieks, "The numbers are all weird!"
Ah...the rotating bezel is still set to when we started our death-defying 10 mile drive on the dirt road, because we wanted to measure how long it will take us to get to the pavement. She doesn't realize that if all she wants is to know what time it is, all she needs to do is stare at the dial, and ignore the bezel (the rotating outer ring). Nice guy that I am, I rotated the bezel back to zero minutes, and presented the watch to her a second time, assuming that if the watch looks like this, Princess will now be able to tell what time it is.
Princess turns away from me, and turns on her force field. I no longer exist. She stares past me at the girl at the cash register, squints at some clock that may or may not really exist (I didn't see any clocks or time displays anywhere), and exclaims, "It's 1:15!" and stomps out of Starbucks.
1 comment:
I always wonder how much use it is to refer to clockwise rotation, when that assumes the audience has ever learned to read a clock. In the digital world, this may just be old-fartism, but there are other basic skills whose lack concerns me more. When the answer to the question "what is a square root?" is "that funny key on the calculator with the check-mark-looking thing," you know civilization is on its last legs.
Post a Comment