Personal Tech
My Bionic Extension
I was not expecting this when I bought it
The first watch I ever had was a Mickey Mouse watch my grandmother bought me on a trip from San Francisco to Houston via train. It was Union Pacific back then and we waited in the hall while a Black porter converted the cabin from sitting to sleeping.
She bought me the watch because I kept asking what time it was. She found out afterward I did not know how to tell time yet. The next year I had lessons and still remember penciling in the hands onto clock faces printed on paper that was more wood than paper. The pulpy tan sheet was so soft that writing in pencil was a balance between no mark and a tear. We may have as well used pen since erasing simply created lint balls.
By the ’70s the digital watch was all the craze. Red LED numbers that you could only read in the dark by pressing a button. Grandpa still wore a gold wristwatch with thin hands and simple indices while the ladies wore delicate bracelets with faces so small as to be unusable.
Through most of the ’80s and ’90s, I wore whatever quartz watch was easy to read, usually a plastic case Timex. By the turn of the millennia, I discovered Soviet-made Poljot watches. These were manually wound and had an alarm feature that would make the watch buzz by spinning a…
