Tissot T-Touch Trouble

I'm a bit grumpy about this... After seven years of faithful service, my Tissot T-Touch started playing up. It all started when the analogue hands started going out of synch with the digital time. It turns out there is a procedure to resynch the two clocks which seemed to work quite well. Bish bosh, job done, I thought*. Exactly why the two clocks need manual intervention to synch themselves is a bit of a mystery but just added to the quirky charm as far as I was concerned.

Unfortunately it soon happened again, and again, and again. Eventually the resynch procedure failed to do the necessary and I was stuck with a watch that didn't tell the correct time any more, which isn't really what you want in a time telling device. Then the touch function started acting up and I started to get really concerned. Fortunately it wasn't anything too troublesome - the flashing "bat" on the digital screen eventually clued me in that all it needed was a new battery. Nothing untoward about that you might think. But as ever, nothing could be further from the truth. I took the watch in to our local jewellers, he had a battery, he popped it in, I resynched the hands and... It worked. Bish bosh, job done, I thought*. I did notice in the shop that the watch was reading the temperature as 86.2 C which I commented on as being a little on the high side but the jeweller said he'd just been working under a hot light, so fair enough.

I was really pleased for a few days that my trusty watch was back in full working order, until that is, I tried to check the atmospheric pressure during a big storm. The screen was blank. I then noticed that the temperature was still reading as 86.2 C and the altitude screen was also blank. Uh oh. A swift trawl round the Internet revealed quite a few people with a similar story "my T-Touch was working fine, then I changed the battery and now the temperature is stuck on xx.x degrees and the pressure and altitude screens are blank." Even worse there's nobody saying "my T-Touch was working fine, then I changed the battery and the temperature got stuck on xx.x degrees and the pressure and altitude screens were blank. But then I did xyz and now it's all sorted."

What kind of a watch breaks when you change the battery? That's just pathetic. Now, I'll admit that the temperature function was a bit pants, after all, it only ever showed you how hot your wrist was which is fairly, if not totally, useless. So I can live without that. The altimeter also wasn't much use as you need to recalibrate it every day and I don't know how high I am almost ever, unless I'm at the seaside of course. So I can live without that too. But, I did use the barometer function quite a lot. No reason for that particularly I just used to find it interesting. And anyway, what kind of watch breaks when you change the battery? I know I said that already, but it's a bit of a sore point. And in fact I know the answer to that question, it's a hugely expensive Tissot. I suppose it's not that expensive compared to Rolexes and the like but it's the most I've ever spent on a watch.

It's obviously a not entirely unexpected problem either as it's listed in the manual in the troubleshooting section (next to the ominous words "return to dealer for repair".) So I'm going to take it to a local Tissot dealer and see what they say but I think it could be a bit expensive to fix. If it's too much I don't think I'll bother, I'll just buy another more sensible one with the money.

Still, at least the title is nicely alliterative.

*OK, that isn't really what I thought.