Is a cell phone enough as a watch?

« An hour, » says the cell phone shop in the station district. An hour, then my smartphone was repaired. Not a big deal if you keep an eye on the time. But I – for 30 years of a convinced wristwatch refuse – suddenly stand naked.

Back then, in the mid -90s, when I bought our first shared cell phone with my father and we, only if necessary, carried it alternately with us, I had put the watch on my wrist forever. This first mobile phone – felt as big as a small brick, capable of phone calls and just to SMS – was enough for me from now on as a timepiece. Soon I discovered: watches hung everywhere. Bahnhofshallen, department stores, parking machines – the city was a single chronometer.

At the latest when I bought my own cell phone from the first salary, which only belonged to me alone, the wearing of a wristwatch seemed absurd.

And today? In the Bahnhofsviertel, after I have given up my smartphone, I look in vain after the next clock. No more parking ticket machines with a clock display, no pointer, no shining display that shows me the saving hour. I desperately ask two “pechert” who help me to be ready for help.

Parking certificates are paid for today and there are hardly any parking spaces along the two « Avenuen ». So why do you need « horodators »? So I stand, a fossil from an analogue time, and miss the world in which a simple look at such a machine was enough.

So should I consider putting on a wristwatch again and- like handcuffing-? Everything, just not. Because the old disgust has remained: sweat and bracelets, a connection that digitization cannot disenchant. And the cell phone, with its memories of appointments and obligations, is handcuffed – in a figurative sense.