Double Flee A

JB Hudson, tourbillons, and rich people

I went in to J.B. Hudson over my school break to show a friend what a tourbillon is. I figured they'd have one, and they normally do, but at the time they didn't.

Definition break: The tourbillon (in English, the word means swirl) is a device invented by Abraham-Louis Breguet (sort of like the Thomas Edison and the Wilbur and Orville Wright of watchmaking) to eliminate errors of rate in the vertical positions. It consists of a mobile carriage or cage carrying all the parts of the escapement, with the balance in the center. The escape pinion turns about the fixed fourth wheel. The case usually makes one revolution per minute, thus annulling errors of rate in the vertical positions. The tourbillon is one of the sexiest things there is. There's a flash amination of one on this page.

When we went in, I asked one of the ladies working if she could show me a tourbillon. She didn't know what it was, but she knew it was part of a watch, so she wisely approached the resident watch guy. I think his name was Bruce. Whatever his name was, he shouldn't have said what he said. Which, as he looked at us, was this: "They're very expensive."

That's not a very nice first reaction. One definition of a gentleman is someone who is never rude by accident, and in general I'm satisfied with it. Bruce's failure to accede to diplomacy would burn itself into my friend's mind.

I look like a guy without a lot of money, which is the situation. My friend also looks like a guy without a lot of money, which he is. His family, however, isn't poor at all. They're extremely well off, and it turns out they do a lot of business with the J.B. Hudson company.

It may have been my friend's aristocratic instinct or his keen sense of how people are supposed to treat each other that inspired him to speak to his mother about the rudeness of this man, who may or may not be named Bruce. His mother then called her step-sister, who called the president of J. B. Hudson. I would like to have heard that phone call, and the next one, which was that that guy then called his mother at home and apologized profusely for the salesman's impertinence. She called her son, my friend, who assured me that justice had been served. This all took about ten minutes, and I think it's pretty funny.

I just wanted to see a tourbillon, and the guy should have just anwered the question and not been snooty. I hate snooty.

posted by dale @ 8:25 PM