My Journey with WorldTimers, AKA Is there a salesperson out there who knows anything?

[BlueHeron]

I am new to fine watches and own only two pieces (a beautiful Sub-C and my beloved FC WorldTimer), but have obsessively studied watches for about a year, particularly WorldTimers.

How funny it is to me that I could walk into a high-end dealer in Europe recently -- every major brand represented, an amazing inventory -- and try on a Vacheron WT, and have the saleswoman not knowing one single thing about the watch and how it works and why it is special.

Not

One

Thing.

List price was EURO 45,000.

And so I proceeded to sell her on the watch

I explained how it has 37 time zones and not just the usual 24; How the zone dial moved and how it functions; how the hemispheres are depicted by the shadow on the globe…

She nodded with interest as I tried to close her and make a sale!! Oh wait, I was the prospect.. :bang head:

And then I was in a store recently in New York, where I saw the new Baume & Mercier world timer. Which does not allow the wearer to change the home city at the 12 (it is stuck on London)…. which from a design point of view makes it DOA as a WT.

So I mention this to the salesman, and he doesn't know a thing about it. He calls over his in-house watch mechanic and asks him…

No answers coming…

And so I told them about the different kinds of WTs and how they stacked up.

Now let me tell you what: if I ran a store and had tens of millions of dollars of fine watches, I would make sure my salespeople knew everything about every model.

The whole thing makes me laugh -- who would have ever believed I would be educating these folks about WTs?

RIDICULOUS, but fun nonetheless. <yes I am obsessed but so are we all>

[BlueHeron]

The beauties in question

[conkers]

Don't get me started on incompetent sales people who have no interest in what they are selling. They are much worse generally in Asia than in other parts of the world in my experience - it really horrifies me; in almost all cases, I will know considerably more than the sales person and I am hardly an expert. There's one brand, almost the most expensive you can find, that is particularly dreadful.

Anyway, WTs - I love these and have owned several over the years. The 37 TZ one you mention is impressive, but who has invented one that indicates correctly for daylight savings? ie HK to London 8 or 7 hours in summer time, or HK to NYC 12 or 13 hours. Is it even possible? I would be queuing up to buy that one......IWC cheats I know by placing special markings on the time zone dial, but it is a fudge. I guess for it to work correctly it would need to be linked to a Perpetual Calendar. Sounds like a challenge for the lovely lady who is running Cartier's spectacular complications division.