Worn & Wound
Opinion: When WatchRecon Alerts Tell the Story of Your Life
The oldest WatchRecon alert that I currently have set up on my phone is for a “Zenith Retro Timer.” I also have an alert for a “Zenith Retrotimer,” because I figure if I’m not really sure how the name of this watch is stylized, maybe a potential seller isn’t either. I think I added this watch to my list of alerts sometime in 2018, or thereabouts. I was falling in love with Zenith as a brand, discovering all kinds of weird Defys from the 1970s and ana-digi watches from the 80s, but the novelty of the Retrotimer loomed especially large. This is Zenith’s continuously running, monopusher flyback execution of their famous El Primero chronograph movement. A push of the button near 4:00 sets the minute totalizer and chrono seconds hand immediately back to zero, but it just starts right up again. Zenith apparently didn’t make many of these (it’s kind of the definition of a niche product) and it seems like the kind of thing WatchRecon was invented for. I’ve always felt that we can learn a lot about ourselves, and our watch collecting friends, if we stop to consider our WatchRecon alerts. This simple app crawls over the most popular watch trading forums (Reddit’s r/watchexchange, WatchUSeek, Rolex Forums, etc) to find listings matching a search term. It takes the leg work out of searching every forum individually, and when you make use of automated alerts that tell you when something hits, you theoretically have a leg up on the competition, and can fire off a...
