As a kid I remember my schoolmates showing
theirs, proudly activating the faint green light which we saw flickering through
the dark hollow made with our hands. It was a symbol of a certain kind of
modernity, a type of civilization which only then Portugal had fully entered: technological
civilization for sure, but also the worldwide market of cheap eastern gadgetry.
In personal terms, and for little kids who had just learnt how to count, a
watch was also the first tangible sign of independence: if not sovereignty over
time (by then we still naively thought we would conquer it one day) at least
awareness of its passing. I thought however, at the time, that the facilitated
reading of the time afforded by a digital watch was cheating somehow: from the
very beginning I preferred the complicated turning around of hour, minute and
second hands one can see on analogue watches. I never had a Casio F-91W as a
kid, I never asked my parents for one. Until rather recently I consistently
relied on freebie watches or Chinese ones which hopefully would last for some months.
On my early twenties I was finally offered my first adulthood watch: a black analogue
Pulsar, and then two more watches came along, a blue Swatch and a brown, rather
more classic French one. The last time I remember thinking about the Casio F-91W
was around September 2001 and the reasons couldn’t be worse: bin Laden wore one
in one of the videos in which he appeared, with his finger pointing up,
threatening the West. I remember commenting on that with some friends back in
high school: couldn’t he at least afford a better watch? The watch became
suspicious in America on account of that, years after its appearance marked the
end of a certain kind of American international supremacy: the rise of the
East with the ensuing global bombardment of cheap plastic. Lately I decided to
buy one: I needed a cheap watch, with a clearly visible stopwatch to jog with. I
was slightly disappointed to see that they aren’t manufactured in Japan anymore
(were they ever?), the inevitable “made in China” glittering on its back. It is
still interesting though, its retro-futuristic style marking a past perception
of what the future would be. It turned out to be quite different, but then that’s
a secret in time that watches don’t tell.
