Finding where the missing aren’t … How to justify any watch purchase.

A charismatic person can sell me on pretty much anything.

I used to have just such a person as a trainer of mine during medical school. He was the chief doctor on the local mountain rescue team and just generally a very cool individual. He did free running and ultra marathons across mountain ranges in his free time.

Just as I wear a Casio Ripley in the hope that some of the legendary alien slaying coolness rubs off on me, when my mountain-rescue-super-hero trainer turned round to me and says “You should join the MR team, it’s good fun” I leaped at the chance to add a bit of excitement and allure to my exceptionally nerdy image (it didn’t work, but to be fair, it had a big job on it’s hands).

So I joined the Mountain Rescue Team, got my cool red MR jacket and proceeded to train up in the necessary rope, navigation and remote medicine skills, and eagerly awaited the opportunity to save someone from a mountain side.

What I hadn’t realised before joining was that a big chunk of what the team did was look for people. Hopefully still alive… frequently not.

These were cases where the police had a missing person they were looking for, and this was frequently someone who had intentionally gone missing. They’d taken themselves off onto the moors with the intention of not returning.

England doesn’t have the vast wilderness that other countries still do, but the Peak District is still somewhere you can roam off and loose yourself should you choose.

Searching these areas could be an absolutely collosal task. You could narrow down the area by seeing where their car was parked, knowing people tend to like walking down hill and using other bits of ‘missing people psychology’ but it can still be a big job.

We would divide areas up and teams would be sent out.

It could be a very miserable task when, after many hours of searching, the person still hadn’t been found and it was getting get dark and cold.

Moral would drop.

But what we were always told, was that we shouldn’t focus on searching to find the individual. We should focus on searching to find where the individual wasn’t. By clearing each area it narrowed down the remaining possible areas and allowed those in command to re-adjust the search pattern accordingly and speed up the process.

Every cleared area was a win.

So what has this got to do with watches?

Collecting can be much the same.

We journey through the hobby in the hope of finding our forever watches to add to our forever collections. But not every watch we buy is going to be a keeper.

Sometimes we discover this immediately on unboxing, with an accompanying sinking feeling as soon as we slip it on our wrist.

Sometimes it’s not till further down the road that we suddenly realise one day that there always seems to be another watch we’d rather wear than the one in question.

But these are not watch collecting failures.

And this is how you can basically justify any watch purchase.

With every watch we buy we are learning where our loves and passions do not lie, and that is just as valuable as finding ‘The One watch to rule them all’ (#still_a_nerd).

Kaysia.