Watch Boxes: Are You a Keeper or a Tosser...?

We all get them, those sometimes amazing and at other times uber cheap watch boxes.  If you've a lot of watches in your collection and you save every single box somewhere in the house, it won't be long 'til the people from Hoarders: Buried Alive show up at your doorstep, accompanied by their shrink du jour.







Okay, so I exaggerate a bit, but you get the idea.  Watch boxes do tend to gather and become Legion while you're off somewhere, swapping out a strap for a bracelet, adjusting the wonky seconds hand on your latest quartz chrono, etc.  In the five or so years I've been collecting (read: accumulating), I've set and changed my own internal policy about boxes, and based on this, I've come up with three types of 'box management' personalities.  Read on and see which category you fit into...



TYPE 1: The Accumulator:

This is the collector who saves every box (along with papers, sales slips and extra links, and old banana peels, etc.).  Irrespective of the fact that he might live in a 500 square foot home, he always manages to stuff all of those dandy boxes anywhere they might fit, and space limitations be damned.  You sometimes have to do a double-take to make sure that there really is a couple of watch boxes in the terrarium otherwise occupied by his twin geckos, Lurch and Hermann.  (Hopefully, he won't discover the hard way that Lurch is actually a Lilly...ah, but I digress.)





Go ahead, open his hall closet; if you don't get swept away by the ensuing avalanche, it's almost fun to watch.  Check his 'fridge, dishwasher and oven - and don't forget the utility drawer beneath the oven - bathroom cabinets, under his lone single bed, dresser, etc.  It's almost as if he's an experienced 'submariner' (or, as we affectionately call them in the USN, 'bubbleheads'), adept at using every possible space for box storage.





Excuses: too many to list in full, but my candidates for the top three are:

(1) They're too nice to throw away...even the flimsy paper ones? (Yup)

(2) I might sell off [insert applicable brand name(s) here] someday...just as soon as you learn how to sell on feeBay.

(3) I have plenty of room...and denial is not a river in Egypt.






TYPE 2: The Tosser

U.K definition aside, this tosser is the type of person who can sum up his (or her) policy on watch boxes in three words: Toss 'em out!!  Never mind that the box still has its papers, polishing cloth, warranty card and even spare links...even a box with a built-in winder is a candidate for a toss into the dustbin.  A  four-word sentence applies here: You never use it!!  This person might live in a 20K square-foot home - with lots and lots of empty rooms - but his (or her) fear and hatred of clutter drives them to throw just about everything that isn't nailed down into the dumpster out back that she (or he ) rents for fifty bones a month.  Dang...where'd my notes for this post go...?





Excuses:

(1) I'm never going to sell any of my watches, so the extra links can be tossed...and when your wrist gets bigger from the weather - or a few too many slices of Bigga Joe's Pizza - you'll start inquiring about the purchase of extra links on feeBay, the whole time denying you threw out the doggoned things to begin with.

(2) There just isn't enough room in this house to store all that crap; why don't you put 'em in the back of your SUV? ...uh-huh, that'll be real popular when you expect me to pick up 'just one more breakfront,' I swear...didn't your mama teach you not to swear?  Hey, it's my narrative, Gus...

(3) I just don't like 'em around the house...even if I keep them in my little attic workshop - you know, the one you never enter? ...OY-VAY.






TYPE 3: The Undecided

This is the guy (or gal) who keeps some boxes – usually the nicest ones, but even that’s a crapshoot – and tosses others out, sometimes remembering to recover the extra links, though the papers and the rest of the stuff typically gets the heave.  In a way, this is the metaphor for the many folks who just can’t seem to make up their minds unless they’re somehow forced to make a decision, and then they spend the next three weeks torturing themselves with the possibility that they made a wrong choice.  UGH.  I personally think there’s at least a little bit of this archetype in all of us; it’s something of a necessity, I think, in order to have a robust built-in moderator.  Or not…





Excuses: None.  They can’t make up their minds as to what a good excuse might be…





Okay, so where would you put yourself in this pantheon of fun and frivolity?  Are you a Type 1?  A two?  Perhaps a three, which is sort of a combination of one and two, though it’s distinctly its own, well-defined type…I think…





As always, many thanks for stopping by…

If it's a nice watch that I plan to sell someday, keep. If not, toss.

SemperEadem2 wrote:If it's a nice watch that I plan to sell someday, keep.  If not, toss.

That's been my policy, but only after a couple of years selling boxes on feeBay...which, believe it or not, yielded some pretty decent profits...