Ticking Along Nicely

As of the 12th February 2010, Madaboutwatches.co.uk will be incorporated into the R&L Armstrong watch selling empire.  My father Rod has retired from the selling side but will still be sourcing and repairing watches in the background.  Linda and myself will now run Madaboutwatches.co.uk and PoshTime.co.uk which which we hope to formalise under a new limited company very soon.

I built Madaboutwatches.co.uk back in 2002 and after successfully trading with Rod as father and son for a few years, started my own site PoshTime.co.uk.  Rod continued to expand Madaboutwatches to new heights making it the premier site on the internet for vintage watches in the sub £300 category.  In November 2009, I decided to leave my full time career in the water industry to run PoshTime in a full time capacity with my wife Linda.  We have been rushed off our feet ever since.  Co-inciding with these events was Rod’s desire to wind down from the sales side of things and try and enjoy some well deserved retirement after a long career in the Defence Electronics industry.  I suspect he’s going to be just as busy but with less emails to contend with!

The running of two independant sites leaves us with some complications and opportunities.  We rejected the option to merge the two sites into one quite early as we felt, both brands had established their own customer bases, brands and style of operation.  To make the day to day running easily we’ve amalgamated the back end operation and database management of stock and one immediate advantage to the customer is we can now offer credit card payments on watches bought from Madaboutwatches.   To the user, the two sites will look and feel very different and this will be maintained into the future. 

Madaboutwatches.co.uk is clearly showing it’s old age in terms of web technology but this will be changed as time allows.   There are big changes planned to PoshTime too, not least of which is how we present the watches.  We are experimenting at the moment in this area and hope to formalise some changes soon.

In terms of marketing,  you will find Madaboutwatches.co.uk will continue to offer the best selection of sub £100 vintage watches available anywhere on the internet, but will continue to offer vintage pocket watches, modern quartz models and wacky watches that you wouldn’t find anywhere else.

PoshTime.co.uk will concentrate on the higher end watches but also continue to promote our specialism in Omega watches from the 40s to present day and vintage American pieces from the 20s to 50s.   There will inevitably be some blurring of the boundaries and you will find that the same watch could appear on both sites.  This won’t be a mistake but a conscious decision where we feel it has appeal to both markets. 

So, there we have it, onwards and upwards.   

Here are few pointers to prepare the newcomer for vintage mechanical watch ownership:

The Bad Stuff: 

1) Vintage mechanical watches are less reliable than modern quartz watches.  Don’t confuse Quality with Reliability.  Rolex and Jaeger Le Coultre represent quality but please don’t expect these watches to work any more reliably than a battery powered Timex or a Casio for a few pounds.  There are many good reasons why vintage watches are worth many times the value of a modern quartz but dependability in all situations isn’t one of them. 

2) Vintage watches are less accurate than modern quartz watches.  The average £5 quartz LCD watch bought from a garage forecourt will be more accurate than a Rolex from the 70s or 80s.  Again if you can accept this point and the previous one you are well on your way to being able to enjoy vintage watches. If you are the sort of person that becomes apoplectic when your watch has lost a second in one day, then you need to move on, there’s nothing for you here.

3) Vintage watches need care and attention.  I’m afraid if you want your watch to last a lifetime, swimming, surfing, rock climbing and other activities are not a good idea. Expensive old pieces are very easily broken. Inappropriate force to the crown, dropping the watch to a hard surface, water, magnetic sources, inappropriate storage, damp, humidity and numerous other environmental factors will conspire to harm your pride and joy.  You also need to wind them, sometimes everyday! 

The Good Stuff:

4) Vintage watches will generally increase in value over time, especially those from prestige makers such as Omega and Rolex.

5) Vintage watches can be worn and enjoyed everyday.  Be sensible about where you use it and keep it away from harmful environments. Don’t buy a vintage Rolex Submariner expecting to use it for diving and don’t wash the car wearing a vintage 1930s Art Deco Bulova. It’s easily possible to buy one vintage piece, use it everyday of your life then pass it on to your kids so they can do the same.  Try that with a £5 Casio.  You will need to budget for a handful of services, numerous straps and a few glasses and other repairs.

6) Owning a vintage watch is satisfying and rewarding experience. The appreciation of fine craftmanship, marvelling at the mechanical intricacy of the movement and knowing you have something of worth.

Despite trading watches on the internet for the last 9 years, this has been my first week spent fulltime in the role (reasons in my last blog post).  It’s been hard work and I’ve learnt some new things, not least of which is the fact that there are some jolly nice people in this business.  It seems when you meet a watch trader, they usually have a story to tell, and a common thread is folk that have had long and fulfilled careers in industry that decide there is life outside getting up at 7.00am each morning and joining a queue of traffic for an hour or worse hanging onto to grab handle on a fast moving train to go and sit in a very dull office for a very very long time.  At some point you say enough is enough and you decide to indulge your hobbies and improve your life/work balance at bit more.

Also this week, I did the unthinkable and for the first time in 7 years, bought a couple of watches from Ebay.  It’s a jungle out there, literally.  Fakes, ripoffs, blatant lies and the kind of service you can expect from BT or one of the energy companies.  It’s no longer a place that the amateur watch collector can frequent without serious risk of getting royally shafted.  Even the pros make mistakes, trust me.  I doubt I will be back and neither should you.

When you find a watch dealer you can trust, stick with them. Loyalty pays because we can often go buying with our best customers in mind, thinking that so and so might like this Omega.  Hopefully we can offer you a preferential deal, just ask! and if there is one particular piece you’ve always wanted, we may just find it on our travels.

I managed to acquire a stonking Breitling Datora 2031 yesterday, and since then I’ve done little work.  I just keeping staring at it!  Look out for it soon on the site.

Rob

It’s with somewhat mixed feelings that I have to report that I have prematurely ended my career in the Water Industry.  Unlike most escapees, I only had to endure a mere 19 years of captivity but nonetheless it represents a bigger chunk of my life’s work than is comfortable to recall.

Sadly, the present economic climate coupled with the 5 year Water Industry periodic review conspired to threaten our business to such an extent that we were forced to make some very serious decisions about how we took the company forward.  I therefore decided to stand down as a Director, allowing the remaining management team enough reduced overhead to prepare the business for the future.

The decision wasn’t taken lightly but was also partly fuelled by my growing frustration with the industry, in particular the procurement departments, now seemingly running our Water companies and the hopeless waste of time and effort in bidding for work where ability and track record were at best secondary considerations to Carbon, H&S, CSR and other worthless policy statements.

At some recent point in the last 19 years, someone took the decision to replace common sense with corporate buyers who’s sole purpose is to carry a clipboard with a sharpened pencil, ticking boxes to check compliance with their own warped vision of company standards.  The outcome is that the winners are those companies with huge turnovers, incredible insurance indemnities, overhead generating QA and Project Management systems, and little in the way of ability, experience, innovation or ultimately ability to deliver.   Meanwhile the small companies with their innovative systems, talented staff, genuine focus on delivery and customer satisfaction get marginalised.  All of this because our water companies would prefer to waste hundreds of thousands of pounds designing and evaluating the credentials of those that are prepared and can afford to jump through the circus hoops of the tender process.  The result is the hideously convoluted and protracted evaluation process that often costs more than the value of the job being tendered. 

Once the tender bunfight is over and a poory delivered project is delivered hugely over budget, it is often the small specialists that have to pick up the pieces as we had done several times recently.  Inexperienced staff seconded from other sections of the business, poor management and ultimately a worthless deliverable is what you get if you screw your suppliers down with the wonders of reverse bid e-auctions and the like.    Does the fact that the procurement process has clearly failed to produce cost effective results ever influence future decisions?  Seemingly not.

‘Mitchell and Webb’ would make a fine satire from it, perhaps a man going into his local newsagent to ’evaluate’ his ability to deliver his paper in the morning, demanding that his paper boys should all attend bicycle safety courses, all have a calculated statement of their carbon frontprints, and all wear safety gloves to ensure they don’t receive any nasty paper cuts. This is of course in addition to the mandatory project management system reports and KPI statements that would need to be submitted each month to evaluate paper delivery progress.       

The irony is that if Mr or Mrs Procurement had simply stuck a pin in the suppliers list, they would have not only saved the company hundreds of thousands in navel contemplating but would also have stood a better chance in getting something worthwhile at the end of it.  To do so would of course threaten their own raison d’etre.  Better still would have been to do what NASA did when faced with the issue of providing a timepiece with which to support the Space programme in the 1960s.

They didn’t send out Pre Qualification Questionaires, demand endless empty policy statements on the environment, health and safety policy and carbon footprints. No, the brains that landed two men on the moon had a much better plan. They sent a guy out to the local jewellery store to buy as many different high end chronographs as they could find.  Then they tested them to destruction.  The eventual winner, Omega didn’t even know the process was going on.   

The secret of procurement is to buy the best product or service available, not the one from the company that makes the biggest promises, covers the most indemnity, or has the largest turnover.  Establishing frameworks based on these criteria is a surefire way to end up wondering why you spent millions and got nothing for it.

When I started in the industry you could turn up on a client’s doorstep on Monday and receive an order for a £100K contract by Friday.  Sadly those days are long gone.  It now takes 9-24 months to ’procure’ the same services.   Meanwhile in 2009 the daily consultancy charge out rates have remained consistent with rates being charged back in the early 1990s, and they were ludicrously cheap then compared to the likes of Accountants, solicitors and Garage Technicians. 

It’s not all been bad.  Five of the last seven years in the industry were the most professionally rewarding I’ve had.  Taking the initial embryo of us 4 Principal Engineers to a staff of 16 with £500,000 turnover was a valuable and rewarding learning experience.  Nothing is really wasted. 

Moving on, I shall be pursuing other business interests, initially concentrating on building PoshTime to new heights.  I’ll still be keeping a close eye on what the industry is up to and maybe return one day once it has learned a few lessons from it’s mistakes.

Regards

Robin Armstrong IEng MIWO

(former) Director

HydroCo Ltd.
       

I think it’s  a well documented phenomenon that as you get older you get wiser.  The flip side of your new found understanding of the world however, is cynicism and general grumpiness.  I’m just shy of 40, and now rather fearful of just how bitter and twisted I will be by the time I’m 70.  Hopefully the joy of actually reaching this goal might help to offset things.

This week’s irritations are Swiftcover.com (owned by AXA) and Sony’s Memory Stick format.

The insurance giants have to be very inventive these days to compete in such a fierce market but some feel the need to verge on the most devious of tactics to get new business or keep existing customers.  Whilst many are spending millions with pun laden Meerkats, and nodding dogs, Swiftcover have a new sales tactic.  You make it as hard as possible for the customer to leave. 

You receive the renewal quote, do the confused.com bit then find a cheaper insurance company.  No problem, but… on the renewal notice it says No claims bonus ’5 or more years’ .  Hold On! . I’m damn sure when I joined you last year I brought 10 years with me.   You can see where this is going….. You see some companies are now discounting policies further for drivers with up to 10 years NCB.   By refusing to recognise any more than the 5 year maximum on their renewal notice, Swiftcover.com can artificially make their premium more attractive.  Clever eh?

Well I’ ve kicked up a big fuss about it and ordered a separate statement letter of NCB from them.  It’s not been easy though. The company that has ‘won’ countless customer service awards doesn’t have a phone number, at least, not one that is visible within my surfing attention span.   They prefer you to converse via their ‘Chat’ system with trained chimpanzees that are equipped with a wonderful computer (provided by Fisher Price or Vtech)  that has an answer for any question you ask it.  It’s the same answer each time of course but you have to admire their preparedness.

It transpires I have in fact got 11 years NCB but I’m still waiting for that letter to arrive…..

Meanwhile I have taken ownership of a new Digital camera, a Sony one.  All was well until I ran out of storage space on it.  Two words,   Memory Stick! After years of being quite settled in the knowledge that any digital device worth it’s salt will come equipped with an SD card slot, I’ve been thrown a curveball, in fact several of varying sizes.  You see Sony seriously screwed up when they made the Memory stick.  Being the size of a chewing gum it was clearly useless for smaller camera devices.  So they made it smaller.  It was still too big so they made it smaller again.  By now, the chaps at Secure Digital must have been laughing their formats off.

 So now we have:

Memory Stick
Memory Stick Select
Memory Stick PRO
Memory Stick Duo
Memory Stick PRO Duo
Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo
Memory Stick Micro (M2)
Memory Stick XC

Confused?, I am.  After much head scratching I purchased a Memory Stick Pro Duo.  It comes with the daftest adapter you’ve ever seen to allow it to be used in some of the older generation Sony card readers.  An exact copy of what you are plugging into it, same no. of terminals, same spacing, except the plastic is slightly chunkier.   In order to talk to my new memory card with anything other than a Sony PC, I also bought a USB ‘140 into 1′ card reader for the princely sum of £1.74 inc post from Ebay.  It arrived yesterday, but it’s baffling to fathom what economic tomfoolery has ocurred for such an incredible bit of kit to have a retail value less than two litres of petrol.

So there you have it.  It seems, it costs millions to goof up standardising on digital formats but only £1.74 to fix it. 

We often come across watches with inscriptions, and find they can be difficult to sell, especially if the text is personal in nature. ‘To Bert with all my love Ethel’ is unlikely to excite many collectors into parting with their hard earned so we either price accordingly or often get the inscription removed by lathing the caseback.   

This nice Longines Automatic came to us last year through one of our usual trade sources and we listed the watch for sale in the usual way.  We obviously noticed it had an inscription but didn’t look any further into it.   It was factual in nature with no expressions of undying love, and on a more technical level engraved in gold fill, so impossible to remove.

Once up for sale, one of our regular customers emailed us to say he suspected the inscription had some significance. In particular, that Albert Edward Johnson, was an American poet and Associate Professor of English, Syracuse University, New York City. 

Intrigued by this revelation I investigated further and wrote to Syracuse University asking whether they could confirm what we believed.

This is the reply I received:

Your inquiry, sent to Syracuse University Alumni Relations, was forwarded to Syracuse University Archives for further research. 

Quoting from one of his obituaries in October 1960:  “Albert Edward Johnson was London born and went to Canada when he was 14.  Graduated from Saskatchewan University he then entered the service with the 11^th Canadian Field Ambulance during WW I.  He studied at Edinburgh University, received his Master of Arts degree from Saskatchewan University in 1920 and then served as lecturer at the University of Manitoba until 1924 when he came to Syracuse University.

 “Here he taught modern drama, forms and art of poetry, creative writing and a survey course in English Literature and quickly became a part of the community, where his quick wit, literary knowledge and deep sense of beauty contributed much to the city’s cultural life.” 

Prof. Johnson was named the first Syracuse University Poet-in-Residence for the year 1954-1955.  He retired in 1956 after 32 on the faculty of Syracuse University.  He and his wife Catherine left Syracuse to live in Majorca.  However, when he became ill he returned to England for treatment and died in London on September 28, 1960.

I did not find any specific mention of a watch presentation.  However, an article in the local Post-Standard newspaper mentions a surprise farewell tribute given in his honor on May 22, 1956 where representatives of the University and the City of Syracuse paid tribute to him.  This sounds like a potential watch giving occasion. 

If you need any other information, please do not hesitate to let me know. 

Sincerely, Mary O’Brien

Assistant Archivist

     

     

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Some further googling unearthed this article:  

 

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Prof. Johnson wins Award with Coronation Book.

Prof. A.E. Johnson of the English department at Syracuse University won thrid prize in the poetry section of the Books of the Month Coronation Literary Competition with his book, “The Crown and The Laurel.”. This was a worldwide competition judged by the professor of poetry at Oxford University, C Day Lewis. Publication of the book George Ronald has made news in production circles. The book jacket and book binding for thise coronation poems were printed at the same time and in the same design.

Printed offset-lithographed, the cover of this book looks just as gay and inviting in yellow, white and black as it did before the jacket was removed.

In a trade publication this point is thought out: “Why do publishers spend so much money on four and five-color dust jackets which cover drab cased bindings? These can give rise to a sense of loss and disappointment when, eventually, the jacket has to be discarded”.

Prof. Johnson has created a graceful tribute to the young poetry. In “The Crown and the Laurel”, the name and themes of Shakespeare are constantly recurring symbols. Nearly half the poems are about or reminiscent of the man from Stratford.

Prof. Johnson’s poetry has been published in The New York Times, Punch Magazine, the Poetry Review, The Christian Science Monitor and the Post Standard. He is vice-president of the English Speaking union in Syracuse.

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Prof. AE Johnson published several volumes of verse between 1925 and 1953 in both the UK and USA, not a major celebrity but a significant character in English Literature during this period.

We hope the watch goes somewhere where it’s interesting provenance can be appreciated.  Meanwhile I shall be found researching all our current watches with inscriptions making sure I’ve haven’t missed anything!  

You can view and purchase the watch on our site, here

http://www.poshtime.co.uk/bigpic2.php?id=410.009&st=SELLNEW 

 

Well if you have been on another planet for the last 5 years you might have failed to notice that the world seems to have undergone a widescreen revolution.  I couldn’t tell you who is responsible for the move but some unknown force has been surreptitiously replacing our standard 4:3 ratio screens with 16:9 items.  I’m not sure it’s even possible to purchase a 4:3 TV anymore and camcorders, laptops and monitors are all following type.  Thinking aloud though, I can’t help thinking John Logie Baird made some monumental cock-up in the original design of the TV set which has since taken 80 years to resolve. 

My theory is compounded by the revelation that some of his other inventions were not altogether successful. In his twenties he tried to create diamonds by heating graphite and shorted out Glasgow’s electricity supply. Later Baird perfected a glass razor which was rust-resistant, but shattered. Inspired by pneumatic tyres he attempted to make pneumatic shoes, but his prototype contained semi-inflated balloons which burst. He also invented a thermal undersock (the Baird undersock), which was moderately successful. Baird suffered from cold feet, and after a number of trials, he found that an extra layer of cotton inside the sock provided warmth.  I may just have been able to give him the heads up on that one.

I’m sure he would have appreciated my current 42″ widescreen plasma, (in the required 16:9 format of course) which not only would have left him dumbstruck, but with a power rating of 300w would have nicely kept his feet warm if he had cared to sit within a few feet of the screen.

 But what we have clearly forgotten is that the watchmakers of the 1970’s beat the electronics giants to it.  ‘Widescreen’ watches were more popular than the Morecambe and Wise christmas special.  

This beauty, a 1970’s Nivada Antares is typical, now for sale on our site.  Aesthetics aside, the time, of course is no easier to read, but in pure engineering terms the large case design makes better use of the lateral space available on your wrist.  Oscar Wilde quoted that “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that it has to be altered every 6 months”, and throughout the 80’s and 90’s you wouldn’t have been able to wear one for fear of the fashion police being called.  Thirty or so years later, these mega styled timepieces are all the rage again with Vintage Omega Dynamics (more oval than 16:9 granted) fetching the price of a new 42″ plasma.    

I wonder what John Logie Baird would have made of it all.

Following another successful years trading and a rush on Omegas and Rolexes of late, we’ve been left with rather embarrassingly low stock levels.  Vintage Rolexes and Omegas in particular are proving ever harder to ‘get in’ at the right price and there is also a lot of rubbish out there, generally the Ebay fallout, which we will not compromise our standards to sell on the site.  Please bear with us, we hope to remedy the situtation over the coming months. 

For years it seems I have been labouring under the misconception that London is an evil place full of smoke, traffic, rip-off merchants and vagrants.   This is all still there of course, but on my first visit for many years I found beneath the stereotypes some fulfilment for the soul.  Hundreds of years of history, stunning architecture, some of the finest food and wine available anywhere in the world, which of course it would have been rude not to partake in. Then, of course there’s the conspicuous display of consumption in all things material.  Of particular interest to me of course were the fine watches and cars in every direction of our designated base, namely London’s premier Mayfair district.

I got bored counting the ubiquitous Porsches and Range Rovers and found my tastes quickly attuned to more exotic finery, Lamborghini Murcielago, Ferrari 550, Maserati Granturismo and more than a smattering of the latest models from Rolls Royce. In the watch arena I was reminded just how expensive new Omegas are now (£3250 for the CoAxial Moonwatch) and how beautiful the styling is on modern Cartier.

In the hangover from the ‘bankers bonus’ era, it’s refreshing to find that in Central London at least there is no such thing as a credit crunch. The sound of Harrod’s tills was ringing louder than Alastair Darling’s national debt alarm and the restaurants and bars were busier than Gordon Brown’s PR consultant.  

My Dad being being somewhat of an amateur social commentator, has many theories on the future of mankind. One of his more well developed musings, centres around the fragility of digital media and the risk of mankind losing an entire tome of information that will never be recovered.   The problem is we have staked our belief in digital storage to such an extent that we have forsaken hard tangible copies of our most important records.  The digital camera revolution means all those personal memories are now stored on memory cards, hard drives and servers around the world, instead of in dusty shoeboxes under the bed. Surely safer now? Well my Dad for one isn’t convinced.

In Mum and Dad’s drawer at home is a Cine 8 Film of their wedding day in 1968.  The last time it was viewed was probably 1969 when Cine 8 projectors were present in probably 0.05% of people’s home rather than confined to Visual Arts museums as they would be today.  He could have course converted it to video, but then we had a choice of Betamax, then VHS. Fifteen years later it would then have to be converted again to DVD and would sometime around now be a candidate for conversion to Mpeg, Quicktime or even Blu-ray.  Such organised multiple format conversion antics, need an Olympic athlete level of discipline to undertake and it does seem rather OTT given that photos, well wisher’s cards, and other ephemera have survived intact without so much as a casual encounter with a jpeg, SD card or 500Gb SATA drive.

My Dad’s theory goes that all important records of our age will be lost through a combination of failure to convert to the format of the day, media and hardware failure.   Imagine the generations 500 years hence, theorising on what life was like at the turn of the millenium, and how they actually had more information about life during the Stone Age.  Judging by the quality of anything we build these days, there certainly won’t be any buildings or other man made objects to give them much of a clue.

Then there are all those that are throwing out their LPs and CDs in favour of 192Kbps encoded MP3s.  Not only is the tangible ownership of a record gone, a big chunk of the sound quality has too, although no one seems to care or notice.  The smart money is on the collectors who are busy squirrelling away those first pressings of Beatles Classics, or in my more esoteric case, an original 1974 issue of Stormbringer by Deep Purple. That’s if the damp and mice in the loft haven’t destroyed it first, which is of course the other side of the argument.   

Consideration for how long your collectables will last is very important and it worries me deeply that watch collectors are pouring thousands into large collections of early LED and electric transition watches only to find the coils rot away and transistors go open circuit, rendering them beyond repair and worthless.  I recently found a cracking Seamaster F300 for no money at all and was delighted when it purred into life after fitting a fresh battery.  Only 3 months later it is now as dead as Monty Python’s proverbial parrot for no apparent reason, with an imminent recovery as likely as Gordon Brown’s green shoots.  An early Bulova Quartz complete with it’s original box also died alone in the dark, in my safe last year, in very similar circumstances.

I’m not so keen on buying too many more watches like this and will stick to investing in technology thats proved to last a 100 years or so.  Whether I religiously start printing out my digital photos and storing them under the bed in that shoebox is another matter.

I somehow doubt future mankind will learn much.