These watches started it all...

Very cool duo. mine started when I was 6, I got a Mickey Mouse watch for my birthday. I’ve worn a watch, even to sleep, ever since. Yes, I need professional help 😁

When I was a kid a had a swatch and got a guard to go with it.  It looked similar to this, I wish I still had it. 😢

That was a loooong time ago. I'm sure it was a Timex.

Thats donkey years lol, my first was a casio f91w of sort, a gift frpm parents. Kids liked to show off their gadgets, setting alarm to set off in the middle of a lesson to catch attention.... 

I was one of them lol

With that said, the first watch i saved up and purchased was in fact a white dial seiko kinetic (no longer works... Lost, possibly got thrown away by mum) 

The first watch I ever purchased was a Citizen field watch, all the way back in 2019. Since then I’ve been hooked. Shortly after I bought my first automatic piece, the Seiko SNK809. That was shortly followed up by the watch that solidified my collection, the Seiko SKX007J. Funny thing, after trying many different straps for the SKX, I finally settled in to one in particular...A black sail cloth with orange stitching. This whole time I was thinking that I’m the only one with this combination. Great minds think alike, or so they say. 

That Monster is killer. 

I have been rocking the black sailcloth with orange stich strap for about a year now.  I like how the orange stitch brings out the orange text on the dial.  Before I found this strap, I used to switch it up all the time with different natos, but I thought it always made the watch stand too tall.

My first "good" watch was a Seiko Kinetic Arctura which my girlfriend bought for me way back in 1994. Still have it. Still have her, too. 😉

In that case, you are in good company here!

NIce story.

Here’s mine! Has just as much a place in the collection now as it did in the beginning.

My dad gave me a calculator watch when I was in the 6th grade before calculator watches were very popular. Needless to say that I aced all my math tests that year. Unfortunately, the next year in the 7th grade the teachers found out about calculator watches and they were banned from the school. Not surprisingly, I did not do very well in 7th grade math!🤣

I started the hobby with this Orient Flight, inspired by John Mayer's Talking Watches episode and his Big Pilot. Got this as well to celebrate my first ever work promotion back in 2015.

Here is the watch that changed my life. It's a (now discontinued) Acqua Indiglo calibre AA63282.

It's a perfectly acceptable watch. It works as long as its battery is good, and that's a fair while--and the batteries are cheap and easy to replace. It's certainly accurate enough for day-to-day use, comfortable, more-or-less durable, and easy to read at night, "brand name" easy, in fact. It's got a date. What more do ya need? In at least the sense that I didn't feel at all bad when I paid for it, it's well worth every penny I spent. Not a ripoff, not expensive.

That noted, I bought it in maybe 2007 and wore it for some short while, and I remember exactly: I just looked down at my wrist one day, saw my wonderfully functional but *boring* watch, and thought: "there's gotta be something more interesting than this." I'd actually known there was, for years--but hadn't bothered going any deeper.

So I hit the forums and started looking.

I keep the watch because it (still works and...) reminds me that I had no idea that such a small decision ("buy a cheap watch") would set up for a chain of events that changed my life. And because I'm really grateful. 

I've been places I woulda never dreamed I'd ever go, all because I bought this watch. If it had been even a little nicer, a little more interesting, maybe nothing in my life after 2008 would have been the same.