The Oris Watch Incident
An interesting thing happened to me last Tuesday, when we arrived in Florida to watch the Deep Impact rocket launch: At the end of the day while washing up, my brand new Oris Formula 1 watch fell apart into the bathroom sink. After the initial shock wore off, I quickly picked out the case, gaskets, and movement from the water, and examined what was left on my wrist...
All that was left was the strap connected to the base of the watch, two screws sticking up, and one screw wedged between the base and my skin. The fourth screw was gone. I reassembled it with my picket knife to try to keep it from getting too dirty inside. This turned out to be a bad idea.
My wife had gotten me the watch for my birthday last month from a high-end jewelry store, Khoury Brothers. It is a really nice automatic and quite accurate -- it was off by only 40 seconds after a whole month. Little did I suspect that a month was all the time this watch would keep.
So, today I took the remains of the watch to the store. Naturally, they had never heard of such a thing ever happening to such a fine timepiece. Everyone there was astounded that it would just fall apart. I told them that I wanted them to replace the watch as it was clearly defective, and it had fallen into water. They said that they must first send it to the factory to let them see if it was defective, and only then can they replace it. Basically the big run-around. I asked them to have the owner give me a call.
Later that day I got a call from the watchmaker at the shop. His "expert opinion" was that someone opened the watch to try to dry it out after it got wet inside from leaving the crown open. This was based on the minor scratches I left when screwing the thing back together. (Note to self: never tamper with something that just breaks until the guy responsible can see it.) He asked if I wanted to send it to the factory or if they should do it for me. I told him he should send it out, and that I still expected a call from the owner. He promised to pass on that request to the person who would be sending out the watch, and warned me that the owner was very busy since he runs 4 stores and would probably take a few days to get back to me. Like people who buy expensive watches aren't busy...
A few minutes later, after I had fumed over this last call for a while, I got a call from the lady at the store who was responsible for sending the watch to the Oris factory. When she called them, they pretty much just told her to give me a new watch. I gladly accepted this offer, naturally, since this is what I wanted all along! She seemed kind of perplexed that I would accept a new watch rather than having this one fixed. I don't understand that.
My only question about this quick replacement offer from the factory is whether Oris is just providing great service to keep a customer happy, or if they have seen this problem enough to just replace the watch on sight. I would hope it is the former. In any case, presumably within the next few days the replacement will come in and I can get back to having a fine timepiece on my wrist. For now I'm just wearing my 15 year old Tag F1 fiberglass watch.
Followup: January 25 I got the replacement watch. The factory sent a just the watch and the store attached my original strap to it. Seem OK so far!
