Nick - Well Let Me Tell You

My watch is pretty cool, if I do say so myself.

Watch and sea.

It's so cool, in fact, that I get a lot of comments on it. People frequently ask me where I got it. If I were a normal person, I would tell them.

But alas, of the many things I am, normal is not one of them.

So here are a few of the different ways I got this watch. I think all of these stories are believed by someone somewhere.

• My dad wrote an article for the State Journal-Register back when he was a business columnist. He wrote about a piece about local businesses including a medium sized watch shop, and the article won an award for journalistic excellence in local reporting. A number of the businesses featured in the article sent my dad gifts after the article won the award, and this particular watch shop invited us to come in for a tour. I got the watch there.
• My grandfather worked at an Italian watch factory when he was a kid growing up in Sicily. He stole the watch thinking it was worth a lot of money, but it turned out to not be worth much of anything. So he stole a more expensive watch and I ended up with this one.
• My high school engineering club, of which I was a member, entered a national product design competition. We designed a really shitty watch, and we didn't make it past our regional. By sheer happenstance, the team that won the nationals also designed a watch, and, as per the terms of the competition, their design actually got manufactured. The education nonprofit running the competition sent all the team captains a copy of the watch that won as a participation prize.
• My friend Robert and I were at the mall in Springfield when we saw in one of those claw-grabber thingies a copy of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame 2. Robert, who is a sarcastic bastard, had been making fun of my terrible taste in movies all day and quickly offered to win it for me. I told him to go ahead, and, neither one of us willing to back down at this point, he puts in a quarter and tries to grab the DVD. Instead, he accidentally grabs the coolest watch ever. As per the terms of our agreement, I insisted that the watch belonged to me. I payed him back his quarter.
• My grandfather worked at an Italian watch factory when he was a kid growing up in Sicily. It was about a mile from where he lived, and he walked there every day. However, he stopped working there when his mother got a job and was able to send him to school. Years later, when he was almost 17, he heard that the watch factory had burned down in a terrible fire. He walked over to see the damage, and amongst the partially-standing remains of the building, he found a glass case of prototype watches. He gave me and my brother each one, and he has fourteen more, all way cooler than mine.

I get stronger with every lie I tell.

-Nick.