All this time; When a cell phone is your source for the hour, the watch on your wrist is more ornamental than elemental.

Byline: Florence Kane

Something the CEO of Hermes USA said made me realize that my longtime state of watchlessness was not a good thing. "I think everyone reaches a point where all of a sudden you look at something," Robert Chavez told me, "and you say, 'This is a really nice accessory on my wrist, and it's a personal style statement.' It's a rite of passage."

I had been asking Chavez whether he thought all the recent buzz that the myriad time-telling gadgets people, especially the younger, tech-savvy generations, tote around-cellular phones, BlackBerrys, our beloved iPods-were harbingers of doom for the wristwatch industry. (Recent cringe-inducing newspaper headlines blared: tick-tock, ditch it: cell phones replace watches; is time running out on watches?; wristwatches get the back of the hand.) And what Chavez said gave me pause. A rite of passage? I've gone through a million rites of passage: moving across the country for college, backpacking through Europe, getting my first job, then landing the first job I really love. Yet somehow, even though I'm approaching my late 20s, I'd missed this one.

I thought about it more. When am I not surrounded by technology that tells time? At the office, the hour stares at me from the corner of my computer monitor, my desk phone, and a television screen in the elevator that displays inane factoids and hockey-league standings. At home, it's on the coffeemaker, microwave, stove, television. And anywhere in between, I've always got my Treo and cell phone, a somewhat Jurassic brick that goes dark in the subway. Pre-Treo, when I wasn't in one of those newer train cars with monitors that alert you to the next stop as well as the hour, I resorted to squinting very, very hard to read fellow passengers' wrists.

I ask my husband, "Does it annoy you when I ask for the time?" "A fair amount," he replies. "It's silly that you don't have your own watch. It's a rite of passage." (How does everyone know this but me?) Five years ago, he had his own initiation. In our second year of dating, his family and I picked out a TAG Heuer as a birthday gift. He loved it so much that he remembers its being stolen from his bag while he played softball in Central Park as "probably one of the most devastating things that ever happened to me."

After this epiphany that I've missed something, I feel sheepish, left out, and a little embarrassed that I don't have a serious watch. I really don't consider myself to be so stringently sensible that I wouldn't splurge on a beautiful timepiece even though it wouldn't be my sole source for the time. I talk to some Cartier execs for insight. Helene Poulit-Duquesne, the company's Paris-based watchmaking and development manager, tells me, "A woman doesn't wear a watch for the time. It is just one more jewel, one more accessory." Frederic de Narp, president and CEO of Cartier North America, agrees. "It's like you change your shoes, your clothes; you change ...