Timex Easy Reader

March 24, 2011

I recently blogged about my desire to get back into the watch-wearing game, and that to that end I had ordered matching Timex Easy Readers for Lady Jessica and I. (Timex has them in both men’s and women’s sizes.) Well, I’ve been wearing mine for a little more than a week now, and I’d like to offer my early impressions.

As I mentioned in that recent piece, despite being a digital watch-wearer for most of my life, I decided that this time around I’d try wearing an analog watch for aesthetic reasons. I spotted a Timex Easy Reader at Wal-Mart and was immediately drawn to the elegance of it. (More on that word later.) I went home and looked around the Timex website at the various styles they had, and settled on the one you see in the photos. Some Easy Reader models have date or day-and-date indicators on them, but I wanted one that just displays the time.

In the comments section of my last watch blog entry, Lady Jessica questioned my use of the word elegant to describe the Easy Reader. Let me clarify that. I think there are two kinds of elegant. One is “ornamental elegant,” and that’s the direction most watches seem to go in. The other is “simple elegance,” as epitomized by the Easy Reader. I’m almost always drawn to products displaying simple elegance and typically find ornamental elegance distasteful.

I’ve always been drawn to, shall we say, spartan design. I like the understated elegance of my Volkswagen for instance. The Timex Easy Reader I chose has a black leather strap and a chrome casing. It features a white clock face with large distinct black numerals in a seriffed font. The hour and minute hands are black while the second hand is chrome. There’s no stopwatch, no phases of the moon.

They don’t call it the Easy Reader for nothing, and I appreciate that as someone who’s been staring mostly at digital chronometers all my life. I tell time on an analog clock about as well as I drive a stick shift, which is to say not well. At the bottom of every hour I start getting confused about what hour it is and have to remind myself that the hour hand is going to be closer to the next hour’s numeral but that it is not yet the next hour.

It’s a little weird wearing a mechanical device on my body. It honestly feels truly foreign to me. For some reason I just find it surreal to be wearing a device with moving parts, and I’m still getting used to the rather loud ticking sound it makes. From a legibility standpoint it’s also dramatically less efficient than a digital watch.

Yet, for all of the little nagging complaints I mentioned above, I really love this watch. I’ve even put a couple of other Easy Readers on my Amazon wish list. Now if only Timex would make an Easy Reader with Helvetica numerals it would be perfect! While they take my suggestion under consideration my friend Miles pointed out that Casio makes a lovely Helvetica wristwatch. Hmm…