Do YOU Have Odd Experiences With Your Watch Customers?

From American Horologist and Jeweler magazine, December 1959

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Do YOU Have Odd Experiences With Your Watch Customers?

IF YOU DON'T, YOU'RE PROBABLY NOT A FULL-FLEDGED WATCHMAKER!


A. T. Stonehouse, 529 University Avenue, San Diego, Calif., operator of a watch and clock repairing shop, specializing in antique clocks, recently suggested that some of the odd experiences of jewelers and watchmakers in their dealings with the public ought to be in print.


Writes Mr. Stonehouse, "I am sure your readers can supply plenty of them." 


From his own rich experience he provided a couple of experiences that would provide a year's supply of salt-water at a watchmaker's bench, and corrode every watch in sight.


Whose tears are more bitter than Mr. Stonehouse's when he can recall these experiences?


"A man brought in his watch. He said that he had the watch repaired by a New York watchmaker about two months ago, and that the New Yorker guaranteed the icb for a year, but the watch had stopped.  We made the needed repairs, and when the man came for it he took the watch, put it on, and started to walk out. The watch repairman was surprised and said: 'Hey wait a minute. You haven't paid me. The customer replied, 'Why should I pay you? The man in New York guaranteed my watch for a year.' He wasn't kidding, either. He absolutely and flatly refused to pay for it.


"Another time I repaired a chime clock for a lady, and of course carefully adjusted the hammers so that they struck evenly.  But she came back complaining that it did not sound like she remembered it! I explained that there was no way that I could get inside her head and find out just what her memory of the sound was, and that the chimes were correctly adjusted, but she insisted that she would have to take the clock elsewhere to have the chimes fixed.  I'm still trying to figure out a way to tell what another person's memory of a sound should sound like."