The “weekend friendly” automatic, or why I don’t really get the idea behind extended power reserve.

It’s morning and the start of the weekend here in Israel and I’m busying myself with doing as little as possible, which involves looking at my watch and letting my mind wander without supervision while I’m drinking my first coffee.

Which is extremely important since I believe that at least half of the disastrous decisions in human history can be traced back to the lack of coffee.

It was about the time when I decided that picking up my ebook reader wasn’t too taxing that my mind came back from wandering and told me that extended power reserve doesn’t make any sense, or at least it doesn’t when it’s presented the way it usually is.

This time I was in full agreement. Why shouldn’t I be when I’m wearing a watch which has practically unlimited power reserves thanks to the big nuclear fusion ball up in the sky? Extended power reserve for automatic watches is useless and I don’t care how many reviewers go googly eyed over the idea of taking off the watch on Saturday and picking it up on Monday without having to rewind or set the time.

Because here is the thing: My weekend starts on Friday and I go back to work on Sunday. Case closed.

Yes, I know. Some of you are going to explain that I should not look too closely at the days of the week and instead embrace the concept of the weekend. If this is the case then I thank you very much for explaining this to someone whose ancestors invented the concept of the weekly resting day (aka weekend). To which I can also add that taking off my watch on the last day of the work week to pick it up again for the following first work day is...well let us just say that I find it intriguingly bizarre. I mean, what am I supposed to do during the weekend that doesn’t need wearing a watch, sleep it away?

Aha! But maybe these reviewers have special watches just for the weekend? Well good for them if this is the case! And what exactly are these watches doing during the five days preceding this weekend? I somehow find it unlikely that I’ll end up with a watch that will only be used during weekend because it has a power reserve of 120 hours and can stay stashed in a drawer during the week, but who knows, maybe I missed the memo. Or maybe they were on the watch winder? But then what prevents me from putting the “not weekend” watch in the place vacated by the one I’m going to wear? I think that in this case the watch could have “not really extended power reserve” of 70 seconds instead of hours and I would not notice any difference, but then again – I’m very bad at reading memos.

But after doing some not too tiring mental calculations, I think that I found at least one case where extended power reserve does make a lot of sense. The problem is that your collection should not be larger than 3 watches, all of them got to have extended power reserve and you should never skip a day or a watch during the rotation schedule.

That’s not going to apply in my case and therefore I’m very pleased that I’m wearing a watch where it doesn’t matter.