In June of 2019, our customer Greg was performing some maintenance on a rainwater cistern situated underground near his home. The tank, which holds some 1,700 gallons, is used by Greg and his family to irrigate the lawn and garden.
But this time, Greg put a bit more than he intended into the maintenance job: his Timex Expedition watch. The watch was fastened to his wrist when he opened the tank, and somehow it came off while he was working on the water tank's pump assembly. The watch fell silently into the dark water below; it wasn't until later that day Greg realized he'd lost it.
"I wrote it off, you know," he says now of the incident. "I didn't think there would be any feasible way to rescue my watch from the bottom of the tank."
Because the lost watch had been such a perfect fit for him, ”Greg is a former schoolteacher and he prized its simplicity, robustness, and ultra-practical INDIGLO® backlight display” he promptly went out and bought another just like it, which he wore constantly through the next year.
But during seasonal maintenance at the beginning of this summer, Greg opened the underground water tank once again. He knew that because of heavy water usage in the spring, the tank would be near-empty. And when he looked into the tank, all that remained was less than a foot of water in the bottom, in which he could just barely make out a familiar shape. On the slim chance it might be his lost Timex, Greg took action.
"I have a golf ball retriever, one of those telescoping ones, so I had a reach of about twenty feet," he says of the operation. "So I reached down there, and I was able to flip the object over, exposing the shiny metal case back and confirming that it was indeed the Timex I'd lost." Then, taking care not to drop the watch once again, Greg lifted it slowly up and out of the tank until he could hold it safely in the June sun.
When we asked if he kept that watch after retrieving it from the tank, Greg cheerfully said, "It's on my wrist right now!" He then sent us this picture:
After Greg cleaned and dried the old watch off "the bottom of the tank was clean, you know, but not perfectly clean”- he was pleased to see that his Timex was still keeping perfect time. Apart from needing an adjustment in the date to accommodate 2020 being a leap year, the old watch hadn't missed a single beat.
To pick up your own rescue-worthy Timex, start here [hyperlink to Expedition page on timex.com] or use the guide below. Then be sure to share your own Timex story with us!
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