Several weeks ago, the band on my wristwatch broke. So I went shopping for a new one. My watch is a no-frills black analog Timex, so there are lots of replacement bands available at places like Wal-Mart and Target. What I really wanted was a plain black band like the original one, but I didn’t see anything quite like that. I finally settled for the closest thing I could find, a band that was black leather on one side of the watch and a sort of dark blue cloth on the other side.
I installed the new band and decided I liked it. The two-tone color scheme was interesting, and so was the decision to use different materials for the two halves of the band. After I’d been wearing it for a while, I noticed that the design was a little more subtle than I had realized. Both halves were actually made of the same materials, but assembled differently. One half of the band was black leather on the outside and dark blue cloth on the inside; the other half was dark blue cloth on the outside and black leather on the inside.
Today it occured to me that this design didn’t make sense. Leather is more expensive than cloth, so why use leather on the inside of the band, where no one can see it? And then it finally dawned on me: I had installed half of the band backwards.
I reversed that half, and now I have the all-black replacement watchband that I had been looking for when I bought it. But I still think it looked kind of cool the other way.