So the watch with the metal back “died” after several days, meaning you changed the watch battery and it still would not work, or did you buy a watch with an already ran down or old battery?
My brother wrecked a few digital watches and credit cards at work before he made a solid habit of leaving his watch, calculator, and wallet in the car. He makes his living working on MRI systems, and the massive magnets kill those things in a flash.
When I was a boy I knew a man who could not wear wrist watches. He was the pastor in our church. He said that within a couple of hours of putting on a mechanical or electronic watch it would stop. There is no time in two hours for him to be too rough with the watch. It is unlikely that batteries on different watches would run down within a couple of hours and that doesn’t explain why mechanical watches would stop. This is someone I trusted (still do) and I believe what he says.
Years later I had a job installing time clocks that read peoples’ fingerprints to confirm their identity. We ran across a few people that we couldn’t get good fingerprints on. In some cases they had worn down fingerprints because of the work they did. In other cases they were old and had wrinkles in the fingertips. We could always get a reading on these people - just not a good enough reading that we could reliably use to identify them.
Except one person. A lady in her mid-thirties came to a clock to get registered and put her finger on the reader and we read nothing, zero quality, zip. I thought that was odd and checked her fingertips. She had what appeared to be good fingerprints. I asked her to wipe her hands with a wipe and try again. Nothing. Cleaned and restarted the clock. Nothing. Tried other peoples’ prints and had no errors. Tried her again. Nothing. I made a comment about how strange it was and she volunteered, “I’m one of those people who can’t wear watches.”
I know it’s anecdotal but I have to say that I’ve seen this in action.
This thread appears to have a strange effect on calendars!
I am not “woo woo” and in fact I despise the trend for gullibly accepting any old nonsense such as so-called “chem trails” or other pseudo scientific explanations for normal phenomenon. But equally do I despise snotty know-it-all types who act superior when others are genuinely trying to find answers for anomalies that they (think they) have observed. Every single piece of knowledge that is currently part of the library of human knowledge was once a giant question mark. So just because there is currently no peer-reviewed scientific study of supposed watch-stoppers and no generally accepted explanation for why so many people report this kind of thing happening, does not mean that all such anecdotes may simply be scornfully dismissed as the lunatic ravings of a bunch of superstitious klutzes.
Yet in reading this thread I have unhappily noted that there are a number of repeat posters who seem to take delight in adopting a very superior and sarcastic tone while offering up terribly obvious and, frankly, somewhat absurd rationales. I mean honestly, do you really think that a person who has gone through ten watches in a short space of time would somehow be unaware of a marked tendency to flail their arms about, bashing the watches on walls and submerging them in tanks of water, only to then turn around and exclaim “Gee, what on earth happened here? My watch has stopped!” How rude, unkind, and smug to even suggest such a thing!
It is also very wrong to accuse anyone reporting having observed this phenomenon in either themselves or others of being a person who “believes in magic”. Reporting something one has personally noticed does not equal being a believer in anything, it is just a report. Science is based in the empirical method, a big part of which is the reporting of observable data, much of which begins as a collection of anecdotes. It is only when such tales either become so numerous as to reach some kind of tipping point, or when some earnest individual (with funding) decides to pursue an avenue of research that real answers are arrived at.
Until this happens, I think that all parties - both those who have noticed things they can’t explain and those who have not - would be advised to keep an open mind.
My own personal opinion is that there is something to this. I do not know what causes it, but I do indeed find that there are some people who seem to have a disproportionate number of experiences with malfunctioning watches that is consistent and occurs over a long period of time and with a wide variety of different specimens. There also seem to be instances of something similiar occurring with other functional objects, such as computers or electrical devices. In many cases the reasonable explanations put forth may indeed suffice to discount anything unusual, but there appear to be other cases that are not so easily explained away.
What does this mean? I do not know. But neither do any of you who proclaim that the observers are categorically mistaken.
Discouraging or ridiculing the reporting of baffling events is shitty and mean.
Please stop it, you know who you are, and might I suggest that instead you get into exploring curiosity in a fun way while collaborating in the great process of collective learning.
There are mysteries in the world. Some we may never figure out. But it can be interesting to discuss them. I do not care for a world in which people are scared to talk about weird things in order to avoid being called names by bullies.
Digital watches have never lasted a year for me. The old fashioned kind work fine.
The man who stocks the coke machine in front of the Exxon station near me looks remarkably like David Duchovny.
Don’t wear a watch myself but I can easily convince myself that I can cause streetlamps to go out by approaching them in a non-clandestine fashion. (If I sneak up on them, I can oftentimes surprise them)
I read something one time from someone who tried to shed some light on this but after thinking over what he said I concluded he was probably just talking out of his “deep dark neighborhood”.
We’re sorry. 
No we’re not.
- They are.
- Too bad.
- No. People who think they can stop watches by their personal magnetic field or some other woo-woo like that are deluded. Learn that!
quad zombie or no
time for another SDMB experiment.
those who can stop watches should meet up with some other, new to them, dopers and go buy some mechanical or electronic watches. have the observer run the watches for a few weeks. have the testee stop the watches, without the watches ever being left alone with the watch killer.
shutting down street lights, the tv display section at an appliance store are all added evidence.
I have a Seiko self-winder.
I have to wear it for at least two hours a day or it stops after a day.
If I wear it all the time it gains about three minutes per hour.
It is getting worse, was only a minute or two in twenty four hours until a couple of months ago.
Just put a magnet against it and it stopped dead.
Also have a Lorus Quartz (Seiko’s cheapo line) deadly accurate all the time - if only I could find it. Took it off and swapped watches six weeks ago, never seen since.
It will re-emerge as soon as I buy a replacement 
You know what’s rude? To set up a strawman like this. Is there a tendency to be rude when people put forth absurd claims? Sure. That’s human nature, just as it’s human nature to misinterpret experiences such as those of people who think they “stop watches”. IF there is something different about those people, instead of them just being the tail end of a probability distribution, treating their watches with less care than the rest of us is the likely explanation. It doesn’t have to be the caricature “flailing about” you put forth.
I mean, honestly, I despise* the sort who smugly lay claim to “the middle ground” of being open to whatever they have randomly decided is an acceptable mystery, while deriding both those who see no such mysteries there, or see more mysteries.
*Well not really, I don’t go around despising people.
I used to think I killed watches. Then my wife bought me a decent watch - a Casio Edifice - and it’s barely lost a minute in three years. Turns out I just used to wear crappy watches.
Your data point, anecdotal as it was , just wiped out 200 anecdotal post from people who think they stop watches due to some magical force they harbor in their bodies. Thanks.
One of the great mysteries in the world is why there are so many crackpots and so many other people reluctant to call them what they are.
And folks who post on a message board just once, never to return and own up to whatever they replied.
I am not finished with the thread but I was afraid I would forget about this statement. I’m 70 so I forget a lot of the time. Short term memory & all that stuff.
The red letters are what I am replying to.
Reasons:
Tolerance
Respect
Kindness
And those that don’t?
Reason:
Anonymous posting to the whole world or very large portions of it without any chance of reprisal.
In 70 years, I have had very very very few strangers walk up to me while I am talking and call me names, call me a liar or any other such.
I am sure they think it but they are not stupid enough to do it.
I think that 99.9 percent here who think that of me are also not that stupid either. The .1% who are that stupid, I welcome with a big smile, right before …
In 70 years I have made some statements on what I saw or did or believe of several small things that if I was silly enough to have posted in a place like this, which did not exist then, but anyway, would have near 100% if not 100% cat calls in reply, be proven out. None were really big at all, no statement about watch killers etc.
But eventually I was right…
Well, anybody can be right once in a while. … right?
Now open that up to many thousands of people who do not believe in anything that is not in a peer reviewed publication that they approve of, that TV & their infallible Uni teachers have not proclaimed as the absolute truth and themselves not experienced first hand, etc., etc., etc., and can’t see why many more people, maybe as many as 20% of the members of this board who have experienced, believe in, know someone personally that does this for legit, etc., and do not post about it because they do not want, need or care about the naysayers.
Do not take it so serious.
I have never had a witness say that I could not do that, that actually witnessed me do it. In here? You bet they do say that. Just because they don’t need to see…
Remember, “Anonymous” is their need, not yours.
Someone would have to be with me night and day for about 3 months … I think mrAru would object. And I happen to like m privacy in the bathroom …
A long time ago, I was exiting a movie theater along with the rest of the audience. We all stopped in the parking lot and pointed to the sky. Something was up there, with colored lights, moving in impossible angles with impossible speed. We all saw it, all agreed on what we saw. If you want a UFO sighting that was a 10 on a scale of 10.
The next day the newspaper carried a story about a plane with advertising that was seen widely beyond the point where the letters could be read.
If I hadn’t read the newspaper the next day I never would have been able to explain it. But never, on the worst day of my life, would I buy into the rest of the gigantic decades-long apparatus of aliens and probes and all the idiot stuff that crackpots have infected the public discourse with since 1949.
Moral. There is a huge and probably unbridgeable distance between stuff that is unknown, unexplained, and unidentified and the answers that crackpots pull out of their asses. An equally huge and unrecoverable amount of time and effort has been wasted in the pursuit of these crackpot notions. I have no problem whatsoever in saying so. They are a drag on our whole society. We are collectively the worse off for this behavior. Why would anyone defend them? Laughter is the best disinfectant.
BTW, GusNSpot, I’m only a few years younger than you. I have no tolerance for intolerance and no respect for those who deliberately choose not to reason and no kind thoughts to spare for those who refuse to learn. I don’t know you and have nothing to say about you personally. As blanket statements about society, though, I’ll shout that from the rooftops.