I used to be really into watches. I sus­pect that along with the rise of the Black­Berry, and other smart­phones, my watch ‘thing’ kinda fell by the way­side. In spite of my wan­ing pur­chases and use of watches, I still appre­ci­ate nice watch design. A cou­ple of months ago, I spot­ted a Stein­hausen watch. If you’re not famil­iar with Stein­hausen, the com­pany makes the watches you usu­ally find in auto and mens’ mag­a­zines. The adds usu­ally tout a ridicu­lous high sug­gested retail price (I’m nor­mally think­ing, “Who the hell would pay $750 for this watch”). That high price is then given the oblig­a­tory bold, diag­o­nal, red slash treat­ment, with a new low-low, spe­cial offer price of $69. Now you’re think­ing, “This watch must be P.O.S. if it can be marked down nearly $700.” Ok, I digress.

Instead of spot­ting the watch near the back of Auto­mo­bile, between ads for Enzyte and rub­ber floor mats, I saw a deal pop up on 1SalelaDay.com (think of it as Big Lots meets the web). In spite of all the eye-rolling about the price cuts, this par­tic­u­lar watch, called the Impulse, intrigued me..

I found the design of the watch inter­est­ing, and for the ridicu­lously low price of $19.99 (a far cry from the $250 MSRP), I decided to order one. About 10 days, or so, after plac­ing the order, a lit­tle box con­tain­ing the Impulse landed on my porch. I was quite excited to give the Impulse a test run.

Uh oh!

Putting aside how weird it felt to put on a watch after years of not wear­ing one, I noticed some­thing with the design of the watch face that pre­sented what would turn out to be an irrec­on­cil­able prob­lem. Take a look at the image posted above. Can you tell the time? Of course, it’s about 7:03. Now…take a look at the pic­ture below and tell me if you can eas­ily detect the time.

Ummm. Let me see. It’s about… __:42?

Exactly! For some rea­son, Stein­hausen decided to advance the num­bers for the hours rather dra­mat­i­cally after half past. The hour between about __:35 and __:50 is pretty much anyone’s guess. Of course, we all have a gen­eral sense of what time it might be through­out the day, bu not so much so that I always know. In my book, a watch shouldn’t make you work to fig­ure out the one thing it’s made for — to dis­play time. Of course, the folks that designed this watch have a com­pletely dif­fer­ent view of their prod­uct. Check out the descrip­tion of the watch on Steinhausen’s website.

“Our unique rotary move­ment Impulse Quartz watch is unlike any­thing we’ve issued before. The hour and minute are eas­ily read­able. There’s no guess­ing the time from mov­ing hands or roman numer­als. It’s almost like a dig­i­tal watch only 1,000 times cooler!”

GTFOH!

Stein­hausen needs to stop it! Right now!

Fun­nily enough, aside from the whole telling time thing, the watch is actu­ally pretty nice. The build is solid, the bright red pops off of the deep black — both on the face and strap. The strap seems pretty durable. Nev­er­the­less, I still don’t want it.

It would be a shame to just let this watch sit in a drawer next. Of course, I could donate it, but I thought that it would be fun to give this watch away. Maybe you have a bet­ter sense of the indi­vid­ual hours of the day; or you just aren’t as put off by the 15–20 min­utes of mys­tery each hour. What­ever the reason…who doesn’t like a free­bie contest?

I will mail the watch to the win­ner by USPS Pri­or­ity Mail. Good luck!

We have a win­ner.

Con­grat­u­la­tions Rod!