Quadruple Zombie!
(and, on topic, I can stop watches and scramble the magnetic strip on a hotel key card.)
This indicates you are either a very careless person or very “unlucky” or both.
So fillings with just one type of metal is also a problem? Because that’s what the word “Especially” means.
How is the neurotoxicity of mercury relevant to watches stopping? Are you deliberately trying to discredit yourself? And even if your fillings created a weak galvanic cell in your mouth, how is that supposed to stop watches and computers? Do you know anything about electricity? Voltage, current, electrical resistance and so on? Because it looks like you’re just engaging in ignorance based magical thinking.
My ex grandfather in law made claims of his skin producing something that corroded or pitted metal. I thought he was full of crap or had just bought poor quality materials. Then he showed me some of them, and they did indeed show odd coloring and pitting.
He blamed it on being exposed to different things in Vietnam and claimed that for years afterwards he had a strange smell sometimes when he sweat too much. He said that these effects went away a few years after coming back, but by then he was used to not wearing jewelry or watches so he never started wearing them again.
Any possibility to what he was telling me?
Over time, if you wear a gold filled wristwatch, your sweat can eat away the gold filling. It might take 20-30 years. It can be accelerated by an acidic diet–tomatoes, etc. If you were wearing a stainless wristwatch, it won’t oxidize.
I think this subject is one of the hallmarks of skeptical vs. non skeptical thinking.
Even supposing the tiny filings in your mouth were using the spit to make a battery, so what? It would be a few hundredths or thousandths of a volt, yet your watch can be right next to a car battery starting and it will be thousands of times stronger and not interfere with a watch whatsoever. We’re constantly around microwaves, house A/C voltage, wifi signals etc but somehow a NON DETECTABLE “current” from your body is breaking a watch? Go get a simple digital multimeter and measure your “current” (there is nothing magic about it) and show how you’re so much more “charged” than anyone else?
I came through to this site after trying to find out why my new watch wont work when I wear it. If I leave it on the dressing table it keeps perfect time but as soon as I put it on it starts to loose time. I have no idea why this happens but wonder if it is due to some extra electricity in my body, wind up watches were no use at all for me as none of them would work but I have had loads of digital watches and up to this one they have all worked perfectly regardless of what I paid for them.
I have not found I have any adverse effect on anything apart from watches, they only other ‘symptom’ if you could call it that is I have often got an electric shock if I touch metal stair rails and give a shock to some cats if I go to stroke them.
If anyone has found a way to ‘cure’ the watch problem I would love to know, I have tried putting elastoplast on the back of the watch but this does n’t help.
There’s no such thing as “extra electricity” in the body, apart from static electricity which isn’t caused by anything to do with your body, but your choice of clothing, footwear, furniture and carpets.
If your watch loses time when you wear it there is something wrong with it mechanically.
But hey, O.P. latest necromancer, thanks for quoting my years old posting. It sure saves me the time of mentioning it all again. Many people over the years have posited that there must be some personal human magnetic electronic field, but they’ve never come up with any proof.
Here’s a WAG. Some watches are crap. They’re not built with sufficient care, and they stop working, for no reason except, their parts don’t fit with the precision a hilly miniaturized mechanical device needs to work under all conditions. That’s why the very expensive watchmakers all harp on their “precision engineering” – in addition to the gold content of the case, or the features the watch has, it must simply be harder than it looks to assemble a durable watch.
All right. I am about as skeptical as anyone. Here is what happened:
1st watch: this was a very fancy watch given to me by my grandmother. An Omega. Pink gold, dial set with diamonds and rubies (small ones). Obviously too fancy to wear to things, as I was about 12 at the time, but I loved it. I kept it wound and on my dresser, and for some years it kept perfect time. After a few years I had some fancy thing, initiation to Rainbow Girls or somesuch, that I deemed fancy enough to wear this watch. Before the end of the evening, it had stopped. I think I had it on for about half an hour before that happened. Back to the dresser.
Back to keeping perfect time, again.
2nd watch: A Bulova. I found this watch somewhere–I think Disneyland. Turned it in to lost & found. After a year, no one had claimed it so they sent it back to me. It was the kind of watch a lot of links, and I have a very small wrist, so until I could get it sized, I kept it in my purse, and it worked. As soon as I had the links taken out so it fit my wrist, it stopped working.
Being that it looked like a good watch we took it to a jeweler, who cleaned it, and whatever, and didn’t find anything wrong. (This was the same guy who had taken the links out.) It was running when I got it back. Shortly after I put it on, it stopped again.
3rd watch: A cheap Timex. Guaranteed for 30 days. Stopped working before 30 days. Returned. Got another one.
4th watch: A cheap Timex. Guaranteed for 30 days. Stopped working before 30 days. Returned. Got another one.
(Repeat 3 or 4 more times)
Then I started wearing my father’s old watch. I don’t remember what brand, but it was a good one. It was huge, girls didn’t wear men’s watches then, it flopped around on my wrist something crazy so I pushed it up above my elbow (very chic, yes). IT WORKED. IT DID NOT STOP.
Meanwhile, if I wanted to look chic, rather than unchic, I would occasionally wear the Omega, which looked very nice even if it didn’t keep good time. What I mean to say is that it worked as a bracelet, but I never could rely on it if I had to be somewhere like back in the dorm by curfew
Now all this time I had never even heard of “people who stop watches.”
Also somewhere along the way I got a vintage Mickey Mouse watch that had apparently been keeping good time for I don’t know how many years and, like the Bulova and Omega before it, it ticked right along–as long as I didn’t wear it.
Now obviously I don’t stop every single watch, because there was that one of my father’s. My conclusion was that women’s watches were just shit compared to men’s. But you know how college broadens your horizons and all that shit, I started running into a lot of people who knew someone who stopped watches. What would happen was they would say something like, “Why are you wearing that enormous man’s watch on your upper arm,” and I’d say something like, “It’s the only one that works!” and then I would get some anecdote about somebody else who just couldn’t wear a watch.
So that’s why I think it’s A Thing. Note that now I have a Casio, which I’ve been wearing since 1990 or thereabouts, and it works just fine. I have been through three of them, but it’s not because I stopped them, it’s because the little things you use to set them wore out (and if it weren’t for daylight savings time, that wouldn’t be a problem because I would never have to set it).
Before getting the first version of this Casio, I had another digital watch. It didn’t stop, but it did run slow when it was on my wrist, and seemed to work just fine when sitting around on my dresser.
To quote myself:
If there are people who stop watches, it’s due to a combination of the reasons I gave in the rest of that quoted post. Unless you think that qualifies as “A Thing”, it’s not “A Thing”.
And being as skeptical as anyone is damning yourself with faint praise. From my experience “anyone” is rarely skeptical enough to realize their personal experience might be a statistical anomaly.
So what do you think is causing the watches to stop?
Well, obviously it was either something I was doing, or I just got the world’s worst string of bad watches. I guess you missed the part where more than one of them got taken to a jeweler who couldn’t find anything wrong with them.
At the time I started dating my husband, I was still in the thing where I bought a Timex and then traded it in every couple of weeks for a new one, since the watch had stopped and it was guaranteed. He mentioned that his last two girlfriends also stopped watches. I have no idea what else we had in common besides stopping watches and him.
If anyone is doing a survey on factors common to people who stop watches, it seems to me that most of the people who have claimed this are, like me, female. I will add another one: birth control devices/pills didn’t work well for me either. Half my children were conceived while I was using birth control. In one case it was an IUD so it’s not necessarily that I was doing it wrong. According to my Ob/Gyn I wasn’t even one in a million for that.
Given the number of people in the world, and the number of watches, that’s going to happen to some people just by chance - and to those people, it’s going to seem like something too unusual to be chance.
When I was 16 my mother gave me a lovely watch - Seiko. It died 8 months later. We sent it back and they sent us another. That one died within 2 months. I sent that one back and they sent me another with a letter that stated that for some reason the batteries kept dying and that it might be my body chemistry.
Since that time, I’ve bought many watches. They last from one month to a year or so but they ALL die.
Maybe I’m just clumsy.
IMHO - In the future it would be really helpful if people would post weather the watch is:
- Digital/Quartz
- Analog Quartz
- Analog Mechanical Wind
- Analog Automatic
- If seiko - is it kinetic. If citizen - is it an Eco-Drive?
There are plenty of factors that people aren’t including - Not to pick on Hilarity’s posts, but:
her Omega watch - they are supposed to be serviced every five years. No note on weather this occurred. No mechanical watch is expected to last as long as hers did without servicing (maybe she had this done). The fact that it works better while not being worn (motionless) doesn’t mean much.
Her Mens watch - if it was an automatic - this all could totally be understood based on the way she was wearing the watch.
Watches aren’t magic. They work by well understood forces. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone got a note blaming body chemistry or something, but I’d think its 1,000,000 more likely that someone is exposed to a magnetic field that they are unaware of (that there are actually watches SPECIFICALLY designed to protect against) than it is body chemistry. AFAIK - there are no major watch manufactures that sell a watch that is Anti-Body Chemistry - while Rolex, IWC, and Omega each manufacture watches designed to protect against magnetic fields.
You wouldn’t feel it if you were exposed to a magnetic field.
I would expect it to only effect analog watches though.
Here are the tools to fix/detect it…
http://www.ofrei.com/page_220.html
Never seen any for body chemistry/personal electric fields
I’ve never seen those either. Nor have I seen watches designed to prevent pink unicorns from stopping your watch, Hmmm? Wonder if there’s a reason manufacturers don’t make such watches. 
The Omega watch was a really old watch and it was serviced right before I got it.
All I remember about the men’s watch is that it had a radium dial (or some kind of dial that glowed in the dark. It was old, too, so possibly radium).
They were all the kind you had to wind.
to martyd1101, hi fellow watchkiller, I recommend a Casio.
Hey, I’m a watchkiller, too - but I know exactly what the problem is, and I can’t be bothered to fix it. Any electronic watch I get - even one that has self-correcting time thanks to a radio signal - always seems to display random garbage whenever I look at it. Usually a stopwatch, or a complicated alarm system or similar.
The answer is that I use my bicycle just about every day, sometimes for extended periods. As my wrist is constantly in a flexed position, it activates the control buttons on the watch at random, and persistently. This basically randomises the display.
There are special watches for cyclists like myself- but why bother- my mobile phone tells me what the time is quite accurately, thank you very much.
Hmm - now that you mention this I’ve gone through several Suunto watches - probably five and more than that heart rate monitor belts. Watches aren’t necessarily water resistant with the pushers being engaged. The Suunto watches I really liked for their data functions (actually most of that could be stored on the belt). I always assumed this was related to me literally drenching them with sweat. I didn’t wear them that much when not exercising, and problem seemed to be very correlated to excessive sweating. I think most of them still worked fine for time functions - but they started to have problems communicating with the belts (sometimes replacing the belt helped, sometimes it didn’t). Some did have the displays get messed up (which I assumed was due to sweat leaking inside).
The manual recommend wetting the belt with water (both polar and suunto). I ended up reading people talking about EKG gel helping - I bought some and it definitely helped. I know you weren’t talking about HRM, but just thought I’d add this anyway
I had this same problem when I was a young man. Many a nice watch died on my arm after several days to a couple of weeks. I had to stop wearing them and bought pocket watches from then on. Then companies started making watches with their cases made entirely of plastic. They were cheaper than metal case wrist watches, so I tried one. The watch never died until the battery went. The drawback was you couldn’t access the battery as the case was solid plastic. I bought a 2nd plastic watch several years later. This time the case was plastic, but the back of the watch had a metal plate so you could change the battery. It died within several days. I bought a nice Bulova wristwatch in my mid 30s and have had no problems at all since. I seem to have grown out of whatever the problem was, but believe me the problem is real. I have 2 sons. One is 6 foot 3 and 300 pounds. He is pretty rough on anything he owns. He does not have this problem. My other son is 6 foot and about 200 pounds and a lot more careful with things and has the same problem as I had. Go figure!!!