Walking the dog past the crumbling facades of San Telmo, I felt the sharp, irregular rattle of a hollow-link bracelet that had no business being on my wrist. It was a humid afternoon, the kind where the air in Buenos Aires feels like a damp wool blanket, and I was wearing a watch that violates every rule I have ever written about horology. It is a 42-millimeter monstrosity from , featuring a bi-color “gold” plating that has begun to flake off like sunburnt skin, and a dial color that can only be described as radioactive salmon.
I am a man who has spent analyzing the structural integrity of fire-damaged buildings and the charred remains of aspirations. As an investigator, my job is to find the point of origin-the moment where things went wrong. Usually, it is an electrical short or a forgotten candle. In my watch collection, the point of origin for this specific piece was a moment of pure, unadulterated weakness at a flea market where I paid exactly $32 for it because the crystal was scratched in a way that reminded me of a map of a city I had never visited.
Radioactive Salmon
Peeling Gold
San Telmo Ash
The Silence on Calle Defensa
I saw Marcelo approaching from the opposite side of the Calle Defensa. Marcelo is a man who smells of expensive tobacco and possesses a collection of vintage chronographs that could fund a small revolution. He was wearing an impeccably preserved piece from the late fifties, something with a movement so delicate it practically requires a prayer to wind. He stopped. He looked at the dog-a scruffy mutt who had just finished investigating a 12-day-old sandwich wrapper-and then his eyes drifted to my wrist.
The silence lasted exactly 2 seconds.
He didn’t say a word. He didn’t ask about the lug-to-lug measurement or the water resistance, which is likely non-existent given that the gaskets probably turned to dust in . He simply nodded, a tight, controlled gesture of acknowledgement, and walked on. I felt the heat rise in my neck. It was the shame of being caught out of character. I was the “serious” collector, the man who lectured on the merits of hand-wound movements and the purity of 32-millimeter mid-century dress watches. And yet, there I was, clanking along with a piece of junk that looked like it had been designed by someone who had only ever seen a luxury watch through a thick fog.
Three weeks later, I received a private message from Marcelo. No “hello,” no “how is the dog?” Just a single sentence: “Where did you find that salmon-dialed disaster? I’ve spent every night this week looking for one.”
This is the dirty secret of the watch world. We all have one. We have the “indefensible” watch-the one that contradicts our stated values, the one that makes us look like we have the aesthetic taste of a bored teenager from a previous century. We wear them in private. We wear them when we are walking the dog, or fixing a leaky faucet, or sitting in a darkened room counting the 232 ceiling tiles because we can’t sleep. We keep them because, in a hobby that has become increasingly obsessed with investment value, “correctness,” and the approval of strangers on the internet, these watches are the only ones that still feel like ours.
What Survives the 502-Degree Fire
My friend Ian T.J., who works the fire lines with a grim efficiency, once told me that you can tell a lot about a person by what survives a house fire. He’s seen safes that melted into slag, protecting nothing, and he’s seen cheap plastic digital watches that survived because they were tucked inside a heavy leather boot or buried under a pile of damp laundry.
“The ‘good’ stuff was always tucked away, waiting for a life that never quite happened,” Ian said while we were sitting in a diner after he’d spent 12 hours sift through a collapsed warehouse. “The junk? The junk was in the room where the life was actually being lived.”
Ian owns 32 watches. Most of them are what you would call “professional grade”-tough, over-engineered tools that can withstand the vibration of a saw or the heat of a smoldering beam. But his favorite? It’s a 42-millimeter quartz diver with a bezel that doesn’t even click anymore. It was a gift from a witness in a case he closed in . It’s objectively terrible. The lume is dead, the hands are slightly misaligned, and the brand name sounds like a pharmaceutical company. He wears it every Sunday.
He wears it because it doesn’t demand anything of him. A Patek Philippe demands that you be a certain kind of person-a man of means, a man of taste, a man who knows how to pair a strap with a pair of Oxfords. A rare vintage Rolex demands that you be a guardian of history, a person who worries about the humidity in the safe and the originality of the tritium plots. But a “shameful” watch? It just wants to go for a walk.
The Era of Consensus Taste
We live in an era of “consensus taste.” Because of the way we consume information, our desires have been flattened into a narrow corridor of acceptable choices. If you are a “serious” collector, you are expected to own certain things. You need a diver with a ceramic bezel. You need an integrated-bracelet sports watch. You need a GMT for the two times a year you travel. We buy these things not because they move our souls, but because they are the “correct” answers to a question nobody actually asked us.
When you spend time looking at a curated selection on a platform like Saatport, you begin to realize that the watches which actually stand out aren’t always the ones that follow the rules. It is the outliers-the strange, the bold, the slightly-off-kilter-that trigger a visceral reaction. The market might tell you that a certain reference is a “must-have,” but your heart might be screaming for something that everyone else thinks is a “must-hide.”
Melted into a “puddle of metal”
Found in the bedside drawer
Ian T.J.’s investigation of a luxury apartment fire : What was actually saved vs. what was left to burn.
The “shameful” watch acts as a pressure valve. It allows us to step outside the performance of being a collector. I realized this as I was walking back toward my apartment, the sun finally dipping behind the heavy stone buildings of San Telmo. I wasn’t checking the time because I had somewhere to be; I was checking the time because the way the fading light hit that peeling “gold” plating was genuinely beautiful. It was a 2-second moment of pure aesthetic joy that had nothing to do with resale value or horological significance.
I remember a fire Ian T.J. investigated . It was a luxury apartment, the kind with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of the river. The owner was a man who had everything-including a collection of 52 high-end timepieces. When Ian got into the ruins, he found the remains of the watch box. It was a tragedy of melted gold and blackened platinum. But then, tucked into a small fire-resistant pouch in the bedside drawer, Ian found a single, cheap, battery-operated chronograph with a velcro strap.
The owner had grabbed his passport and his laptop, but he had left the luxury collection to burn. When Ian returned the scorched velcro-strap watch to him, the man cried. He didn’t cry for the $102,000 worth of Swiss engineering that had turned into a puddle of metal in his living room. He cried for the $22 watch he’d bought on a beach in because it was the one he wore when his daughter was born.
We are so afraid of having “bad taste” that we often forget to have any taste at all. True taste is not the ability to identify a high-quality object; any machine can be programmed to do that. True taste is the ability to maintain a relationship with an object that the rest of the world has discarded. It is the willingness to be seen in a 42-millimeter salmon-dialed mistake because that mistake reminds you of a version of yourself that wasn’t trying so hard to be right.
I’ve since stopped hiding the Salmon Disaster. I wore it to a dinner with 2 other collectors last week. They spent the first of the meal trying to figure out if I was being ironic. They looked for the “tell”-the wink that suggested I was making a sophisticated joke about the 90s aesthetic. I didn’t give it to them. I just let the watch sit there, flaking and glowing under the restaurant lights.
Eventually, the conversation shifted. We stopped talking about auction results and started talking about the first watches we ever owned. We talked about the ones we lost, the ones we broke, and the ones we still have tucked away in the back of a drawer because we can’t quite bring ourselves to throw them out. By the end of the night, one of the collectors admitted he had a two-tone quartz watch from that he wears every time he has to make a difficult phone call. It’s his “armor,” he said, because it reminds him of his father, who didn’t know a tourbillon from a toaster but knew how to be brave.
Companion Without Ego
The shameful watch is the healthy watch because it is the only one that isn’t a trophy. It is a companion. It has no ego. It doesn’t care if you’re wearing it with a suit or with a pair of old sweatpants that have a hole in the pocket. It doesn’t care if you’re the 2nd owner or the 102nd. It is just there, ticking away (or humming, if it’s a quartz), providing a 12-millimeter-thick buffer between you and the expectations of the world.
I got home and took the watch off, laying it on the nightstand next to a much “better” timepiece. The contrast was hilarious. One was a masterpiece of finish and form; the other looked like something you’d find at the bottom of a cereal box in a fever dream. But as I counted the ceiling tiles, waiting for sleep to come in the heat of the bedroom, my eyes kept drifting back to the salmon dial.
We spend so much of our lives trying to build a version of ourselves that is fireproof-unassailable, perfectly curated, and immune to criticism. But it’s the things that aren’t fireproof, the things that are a little bit melted, a little bit flaked, and a whole lot “wrong,” that actually tell the story of who we are when the lights go out.
The next time you see a watch that makes you cringe, don’t look away too fast. There might be a reason it’s calling to you. And the next time you find yourself browsing through the endless rows of “correct” choices, remember that sometimes the most honest thing you can do is buy the disaster. Own the mistake. Wear the shame. Because a collection that only consists of things you’re proud to show off is not a collection at all; it’s a museum. And nobody actually lives in a museum. They just visit.
I’ll keep my Salmon Disaster. It’s been since I last wore my “good” watch, and I think the dog prefers the rattle of the hollow links anyway. It sounds like a celebration of everything that shouldn’t work, but does.