english readers

[Arrais]

Peço desculpas aos amigos mas achei este texto tão engraçado que resolvi postar aqui. Ele me fez sentir ainda mais doido...por causa desta mania de relógios - e finalmente chegar a conclusão de que a compra de um relógio é algo totalmente emocional.

Estou com muita preguiça de traduzir e posto em inglês mesmo...espero que gostem.

I'm calling time on silly watches
Jeremy Clarkson

After many years of faithful service, my watch has gone wrong. It just
chooses random moments of the day to display meaningless times which,
speaking as the world's most punctual person, is a nuisance. Especially as I
shall now have to go to a shop and buy a replacement.

Yes, I know I could send it to the menders but, because I really am the most
punctual person in the world, what am I supposed to do while it's away? Use
the moon? For me, going around without a watch is worse than going around
without my trousers.

Of course I have a back-up. My wife bought it for me many years ago with her
last salary cheque and it's very beautiful. But sadly my eyes are now so old
and weary that I can't read the face properly. Which means I turned up to
meet an old friend one hour late last week. And that, in my book, is ruder
than turning up and vomiting on him.

It also brings me on to the biggest problem I've found in my quest to find a
new timepiece. There's a world of choice out there but everything is
unbelievably expensive and fitted with a whole host of features that no one
could possibly ever need.

I have flown an F-15 fighter and at no point in the 90-minute sortie did I
think: "Damn. I wish my watch had an altimeter because then I could see how
far from the ground I am." All planes have such a device on the dashboard.
Similarly, when I was diving off those wall reefs in the Maldives I didn't
at any time think: "Ooh. I must check my watch to see how far below the
surface I have gone." Thoughtfully, God fitted my head with sinuses, which
do that job very well already.

You might think, then, that my demands are simple. I don't want my new watch
to open bottles. I don't want it to double up as a laser or a garrotte. I
just want something that tells the time, not in Bangkok or Los Angeles, but
here, now, clearly, robustly and with no fuss. The end.

But it isn't the end. You see, in recent months someone has decided that the
watch says something about the man. And that having the right timepiece is
just as important as having the right hair, or the right names for your
children, or the right car.

Over dinner the other night someone leant across to a perfect stranger on
the other side of the table and said: "Is that a Monte Carlo?" It was,
apparently, and pretty soon everyone there was cooing and nodding
appreciatively. Except me. I had no idea what a Monte Carlo was.

Then we have James May, my television colleague, who has a collection of
watches. Yes, a collection. But despite this he has just spent thousands of
pounds on a watch made by IWC. Now I know roughly what he earns and
therefore I know what percentage of his income he's just blown on this watch
and I think, medically speaking, he may be mad.

It turns out, however, that his IWC, in the big scheme of things, is
actually quite cheap. There are watches out there that cost tens or hundreds
of thousands of pounds. And I can't see why.

Except of course, I can. Timex can sell you a reliable watch that has a back
light for the hard of seeing, a compass, a stopwatch and a tool for
restarting stricken nuclear submarines, all for £29.99. And that's because
the badge says Timex. Which is another way of saying that you have no style,
no sense of cool and that you may drive a Hyundai.

To justify the enormous prices charged these days, watchmakers all have
idiotic names, like Gilchrist & Soames, and they all claim to make
timepieces for fighter pilots and space shuttle commanders and people who
parachute from atomic bombs into power boats for a living. What's more, all
of them claim to have been doing this, in sheds in remote Swiss villages,
for the last six thousand years.

How many craftsmen are there in the mountains I wonder? Millions, by the
sound of it.

Breitling even bangs on about how it made the instruments for various
historically important planes. So what? The Swiss also stored a lot of
historically important gold teeth. It means nothing when I'm lying in bed
trying to work out whether it's the middle of the night or time to get up.

Whatever, these watch companies give you all this active lifestyle guff and
show you pictures of Swiss pensioners in brown store coats painstakingly
assembling the inner workings with tweezers, and then they try to flog you
something that is more complicated than a slide rule and is made from
uranium. Or which is bigger and heavier than Fort Knox and would look stupid
on even Puff Diddly.
I think I've found an answer, though. There's a watch called the Bell & Ross
BR 01-92 which, according to the blurb, is made in Switzerland from German
parts by a company that supplies the American military and is used regularly
by people who make a living by being fired from the gun turrets of Abrams M1
tanks while riding burning jet-skis.

Who cares? What I like is that it's very simple and has big numbers, but
what I don't know is whether it's reliable and whether people laugh at you
because of it at dinner parties. Anyone got one? Anyone know?

[Alberto Ferreira]

Salve!

lLgal, Arrais!
Grato por compartilhar. Eu também dei boas risadas. 

O "dilema" dos motivos alegados por cada um para ter um (ou mais) relógio, passando pela escolha final do modelo eleito, não é nada "racional",...    

Um abraço!
Alberto