My normal mood when considering the outside world is one of, at best, irritation — on a scale on 1 to 10, I wake up each morning at about 5 — and especially so when I haven’t finished my first cup of coffee.
I am furious.
Perhaps a little background is in order. For my birthday last year, my kids chipped in together and bought me a Seiko Sports wristwatch with an automatic movement.
It’s a lovely watch, not too expensive, not too showy, and of course I replaced the silly canvas strap (which scratched my oh-so delicate skin) with a nice black leather one which didn’t.
All went well until I actually started using the fucking thing. You see, the nice thing about an automatic movement is that you don’t have to wind it, and it doesn’t have a battery which runs down and needs replacing just about every year, which are the reasons I wanted one in the first place. According to the specs, this watch, when the mainspring is fully wound up, so to speak, has a “reserve” power of about 36 hours, which means you can leave it lying around unworn for about a day and a half before you need to wave your arm in the air to recharge it.
So I wore the thing for a couple days to charge the spring up, then took it off at bedtime and went to sleep. And found the next morning that the watch had stopped after about six hours. No amount of arm-waving could get it charged past that paltry reserve.
So I sent the watch back to Seiko USA to get it fixed under warranty, but discovered yesterday that despite the proof of date of purchase, the watch was considered “out of warranty” because nobody had actually sent back the registration card.
The cost of repair was about the same as the original price of the watch.
So this morning I called Seiko and told them to send the thing back to me un-repaired — fuck ’em — and told the customer “service” rep that I would never consider buying another Seiko product, ever. Of course, as the Seiko repair shop is in New fucking Jersey, my comment was met with complete indifference.
I’ll hand the watch back to Daughter and let her decide what she and the others want to do.
Now add this little irritation to my wake-up Irritation Level 5… and none of the posts which preceded this one helped matters at all.
If anyone wants me, I’ll be at the range.
Update: Daughter informs me that the place where she bought the watch has a 3-year warranty on all new Seiko watches, so all I have to do is send it there for the repairs to be effected. Now I just have to wait for it to get back from Noo fucken Joizee.
