It Took Going to Geneva to Get My Watch Fixed

When you live in New York, everyone’s got a “guy” they want to recommend to you. “Guys” can be dry cleaners, house painters, SAT tutors, and everything in between. “Guys” can often be women. Sometimes "guys" are apps.

A good watch repair person is high in the hierarchy of “guys,” but they’re hard to find. Good watch repair people, I’ve learned, don’t work in stores, but rather in the back rooms of top floors of midtown skyscrapers. Great watch repair people, others have told me, forego the back rooms in midtown for spare bedrooms in their apartments in Cobble Hill.

I learned all this because I was on a quest. I needed a watch guy to complete a task I thought was pretty standard, possibly even innocuous. I needed someone to fix my 1958 Hamilton Pacer. But nobody in New York City would touch the damn thing.

I bought my Pacer at a Parisian vintage store for only €80. I should note that the Hamilton Pacer is not a luxury watch. There are no movies in which Steve McQueen wears it. Christie’s doesn’t auction them for tens of thousands of dollars. In fact, most people know it as the watch from Men In Black. It has a unique, triangular shape, but is also rounded in a way that’s really striking. Its gold-on-white face can sometimes be a bit hard to read, but in 2019, with phone clocks, I was willing to pay that price. To be honest, even when I wear it while broken I still get more compliments than when I wear any of my working watches. It is still rare in that there aren’t that many of them around though, and because of its unique “electric” movement, as opposed to one with a ruby or quartz. It occurred to Hamilton pretty quickly that these weren’t exactly built-to-last, and so they stopped working with them completely.

Which I quickly learned: The second I stepped over the threshold of the shop, the watch stopped working. (I shouldn’t say stopped working. It ticks, then jams, and then unjams miraculously and keeps ticking. You know how they say a broken watch is right twice a day? Not mine.) I figured I’d splurge and have it fixed, and break even on what I would have paid for one in good condition.

I don’t know much about watches, which makes the process of going around to the “guys” of friends and coworkers infuriating. “Have you tried calibrating the the spring-mount?” one asked me. “It could be the chronometer,” offered another.

“We’re just going to send it to the manufacturer Hamilton,” was uttered so many times, I cracked and stuck a bubble-wrapped watch in an envelope and sent it there myself on the recommendation of “professionals.”And then it was gone.

8 months later, it landed in my mailbox with about 15 return-to-sender stamps, accompanied by an email.

“We would love to service your Pacer timepiece here in Switzerland, however we cannot accept watches with electric movements anymore,” a watchmaker at Hamilton wrote. “Vintage, mechanical Hamilton watches are serviced with us regularly. All watches produced by Hamilton since 1892 can be serviced by us, unfortunately only the Electric movements not [sic]. In the 60s, this was revolutionary technology, but today no watchmaker wants to have returning customers for free battery exchanges every 6-12 months.”

While Hamilton wasn’t any help in fixing the watch, the process did spark a bigger idea of someone who could—halfway around the world, in a city known for its watchmaking.

I knew a little about Switzerland: the cheese, the Army Knives, the Families Robinson. I didn’t know as much about Geneva. Cursory research, though, told me that if Los Angeles is a company town powered by filmmaking, Geneva is powered by watchmaking. I knew this was the place that I would find an answer or the Pacer, and decided to go in search of the truth. A week later, I found myself in a cab riding into the city center, where giant letters spell Piaget, Patek Philippe, and Tissot. The signs sit on building roofs like crowns. In the center of Lake Geneva, a 459-foot-tall jet of water bursts out of the otherwise placid pool, created from excess: it’s powered by unused pressure from the city’s watch factories of yesteryear.

After checking into my hotel, I started wandering up through the Old Town, a stretch of cobblestone streets filled with art galleries, design studios, centuries-old buildings held up by wooden beams, and horologists—tiny offices of people hunched over desks working on watches of all sizes and pricepoints.

At the recommendation of the hotel concierge, I made way for a luxury watch retailer along the Rue du Marché. A man in a suit and tie greeted me, kindly took brought my watch around the back to an horlogerie specialist, and returned a few minutes later, saying that the watch maker would not be able to do anything with this.

So I kept looking. Like an American, I trusted name brands. The platform-elevated reception desks of boutiques for Piaget, Mille, and others, all mysteriously turned me down with a whirlwind of French.

It was getting dark, and Geneva all but closes after 7:00. On the walk back down the hill to my hotel, I saw a man standing outside one of the shops. Through the glass he was leaning against, I could see several work benches topped with screwdrivers, lamps, and bits of gears. After muttering enough French phrases, the only ones I knew, he put down his cigarette and told me he spoke English. He took a look at my now-frozen watch, inviting me into the shop to have a closer look.

Where every other watchmaker had taken the piece into a back room and had another person usher it back to the front with a sigh and an apology, Fabiano Pericles, a former Frédérique Constant staffer turned independent restoration specialist, took action. He pulled out a small blade and sliced right into the back of the case. The back popped off and rolled on the table, revealing whirling movements and gears churning. Snapping a lens around his eye, he bent over the piece to examine it.

After a few minutes of tinkering with tiny tweezers, he looked up with the answer to what had been plaguing me: “Dust.”

Seriously?

“There’s dust on the inside of the mechanism, that’s what’s holding the hands from moving.”

To be fair, there were a few other things he offered.

“The problem is that with the years the oils dry and freeze the mechanism that makes it work. If your battery is not powerful enough to maintain the operation that requires a lot of energy, it will not work well. It needs a complete service, a change of battery, and a rigorous control to ensure its proper functioning,” he said. “Manufactures like Hamilton don’t want to work with old pieces like this one because the cost of repair would be too important for them. Generally, they do not have spare parts and do not know the old movements very well. That's why working on the repair would be a waste of time and money.”

And that was it. I thanked Pericles and returned to New York, armed with the right knowledge and a lesson in the Pacer’s horological anatomy to relay to my local watch repair person in New York. Once the doctor identifies the illness and prescribes the right medicine, your local pharmacy can fill it easily, and without an exchange rate from dollars to Swiss Francs. Now, I’ve yet to be late to a meeting (at least late because of the watch.)

I’ve been left with this knowledge: that the skill and craft of watchmakers at every level is so much more than you can see looking at just the face of a watch. That’s why people that save the world in movies even wear all kinds. James Bond might wear an Omega Seamaster, but Robert Langdon wears a Mickey Mouse Timex. So wear the watch that you like the most, or looks the coolest, and put your movement where your mouth is.

Originally Appeared on GQ