Garbage acquires value merely by accumulating age, hence the largest Enviro-whiner piggy banks in the world - landfills. I had a real Mickey Mouse watch as a child and, though it kept time like a sand hourglass riding a roller coaster, imagine what it would be worth 50 years later! I now own a whiz bang $19.95 digital Casio with three - count 'em - three little polished steel buttons peeping up about its periphery. The fourth spot is hermetically sealed lest the objet d'art be mistaken for its $24.99 big brother. I entertain an uncomfortable suspicion that innocently hitting my wrist against an edge will activate its undocumented "Emergency Traumatic Amputation" feature. That bloody icon of temporal technological excess does just about everything else. All that lacks is a button sequence designated "Undo." Even the bane of microcomputation, Microcrap Windoze, admits to proximately reversible catastrophe (not that it delivers promised salvation vs. inevitable disaster).
My watch's peripheral buttons are notable for their repertoire of nuisance functions. A slight jar of the widget or a flex of the wrist will launch my watch into paroxysms of multipurpose absurdity. The accordion-folded quarter pound manual printed in microscopic type expounds in oodles of archaeologically interesting languages (all presumably badly translated from the Japanese) what the various button combinations, sequences, and quantum indeterminacies foment. A pretty allegory it is not.
Pushing one of the buttons changes from 12 hour to 24 hour display. Pushing another briefly illuminates the dial. If during the Cenozoic Era you push the third button, a sequence of two buttons, or if it is 29 February 29 2000 the multivariable features engage. Depending on order and timing one can pluck from the aether 39 different electronic fantasies handy for celebrating anomie or extolling the virtues of anhedonia.
We have regular timekeeping in three different flavors, alarm mode in four, stopwatch mode in three, and time/calendar setting for all planet-bearing stars within a 50 lightyear radius of Earth in elliptic, plane, or hyperbolic space. The manual's topological maps sketch ingress into sophisticated functions which require a Masters degree in the Liberal Arts - or things happen to you. I had not seen Venn diagrams since the New Math. Can anyone clarify the nuances of phase velocity and group velocity in Hilbert space?
But wait, there is more! There are WARNINGS! The litigious nature of American society demands chapters of waffling cut-outs, liability disclaimers, and WARNINGS! Consider the moisture table laid out in the manual: My Casio timekeeper has laser-etched on its case one of four water-resistance ratings.
I audited the water resistance rating on my watch's case. "N/A"
Ah yes, that beep. It is not just any consummately irritating cheap electronic raspberry. The closest acoustic exudate I have quaffed occurred when an acquaintance, ankles caressed by stainless steel stirrups, was told her IUD had to go. The doc grabbed the two trailing polypropylene thread leads and summarily yanked it out. Just before her vocal cords exponentially overloaded and quit... that's the beep. It makes the cat growl.
The plastic watch band has a recycle emblem molded into it. It is Recycle Category #7 - Do Not Recycle. Given the garbage which by law and against all rational endeavor is recycled, it leads one to wonder. It has branded my wrist with its mirror image. No problem, as I did not sign the DMV organ donor card.
My previous plastic fantastic electronic chronometric doodad was a Timex. True to its slogan, it was partially melted in a lab mishap and kept on ticking, maintaining the same sloppy correlation to the passing moments as it did before the incident. Garbage acquires value merely by accumulating age. I now have two watches relentlessly accumulating time. I doubt there is enough time remaining to age either one of them into value.