PERSPECTIVE

My watch broke last night. The band, which has been slipping around a bit for a while, finally decided to file for divorce from the main face of the watch, and demanded, besides visiting rights to the links, a complete and final separation, effective immediately (alimony is still under debate at this time).


It's not that I am simply accustomed to wearing a watch. I am totally and completely ADDICTED to wearing a watch. I go into immediate and violent seizures if I cannot - well, not really tell what time it is, because I do have an eerie sense of what time it is naturally - but if I cannot BEGIN A TIMER.


I blame it on being a piano tuner in the past. With tuning, you need to have an exact sense of (no, not pitch, believe it or not, but) TIMING. You have to be able to tell the difference between eight beats per second and nine beats per second - which means it's very important to be able to tell EXACTLY how long a second is.


And somehow that carried over to me having to know EXACTLY how long... well, just about anything and everything in the universe is. I time my naps - I begin to time whenever an actor says "The bomb will explode in 15 seconds!" and then announce to everyone present that it actually took 38 seconds instead of 15 (ask Harmony, I drive her crazy with this) - I time how long it takes to fill the horses' watering trough - how long traffic lights are - the list is endless.


(And to prove this, if you look up the word 'compulsive' in Webster's, you will see a photo of my watch, set on 'timer', next to it!)


So where do you go to get a watch fixed?


I learned a long time ago the watch repairmen (repair person?) actually expect to get PAID when they do something, and I'm too cheap for that - so you go to an expensive jewelry store. They have the equipment, usually have the experience, and they do NOT expect to get paid. I guess their logic is that the next time you want to go into debt for some incredibly expensive piece of pressed rock, you will come BACK to them.


However, today I was dressed in my regular attire - blue jeans that were not exactly clean (you try to graze two horses for 45 minutes before you leave home and stay pristine), my regular slightly-stained blue tee-shirt (see previous excuse) and untied tennis shoes (I've gotten into the habit of just slipping my feet into my shoes - takes time and effort to tie them).


Then add to this overwhelming pleasing (albeit sloppy) picture the fact that I have JUST worked out at the gym. For those of you who do not know me (i.e. Jen), when I do any more physically tasking than walking (and, yes, I'll admit, sometimes JUST walking... SLOWLY), I get very red in the face, and I sweat PROFUSELY.


So, here I am, even by southern Arizona standards, not at all dressed-to-impress, hot and sweaty and red, walking into the big jewelry shop at the mall (yes, I live in a small enough town that we only HAVE one mall) to ask for help with my watch.


I figured an extremely well-dressed salesperson to ignore me at first, and then turn elegantly on their to hear my plea, and then take my watch (probably after putting on non-latex gloves and picking them up with a delicate pair of tweezers, and examining the damage with a monocle).


So I didn't at first realize that the woman with velcroed - closed sandals, a mumu - like dress (and not nice formal Hawaiian wear mumu, but the old ladies section at WalMart for senior citizens with poor vision and a taste for loud, obnoxious prints), incredibly teased and sprayed bright RED hair and (I kid you not) TWO missing front teeth (honest, I'm not making this up, even for the sake of the storyline) was the salesperson.


I suddenly felt much better about myself.


And she did fix my watch.


Moral of the story? Someone ALWAYS looks worse than you do.