One of the things you've gotta talk about when talking about watches, is the cost of getting into the game. A lot of us get interested in watches well in advance of actually being able to afford most of them – I happened to be in graduate school when I got bitten by the watch bug; we'd just had our first kid and we didn't have a proverbial pot to piss in, but what we did have was a computer and internet access, which meant fast and easy access to a whole universe of things both desirable and completely unaffordable. Though I started out mostly interested in history and the physics of precision timekeeping, it wasn't long before I began hankering for something modern. It's interesting to think about what one's first "good" watch really was, because "good" and "expensive" definitely don't stand in direct relationship to each other, and though the insane spike in prices for both vintage and new watches over the last ten or so years tends to obscure that fact, it doesn't mean that there aren't wonderful watches out there for the asking – some of which you can almost literally acquire with change recovered from in between the sofa cushions.