Thread resurrection time. Getting ready for our upcoming trip to Egypt. Dug out the old Citizen NaviHawk, took it down to my jeweler for a new battery. Worked great - for 24 hours. Wonderful - its now a battery killer. Well, let's see what Citizen's repair center says about it - mailed it off.
3 weeks later, they wanted $450 to fix it, had to replace the entire movement, etc, etc. Well, its a beautiful watch, but not that beautiful, I paid $299 for it back in the day. Definitely want a watch for the trip, the ancient sacred sites don't have clocks, and probably don't have cell service either - and I don't wanna drag my flip out to them anyway. So I bought this from "Warrior Woman":
No more annual battery replacements, and if I don't wear it, I'll just leave it out somewhere to keep it charged and I'll probably never have to worry about it. It was less than half the repair cost of the old one. The leather strap sucks, a metal one will be here on Friday. Pretty remarkable tech actually, if it gets a full charge, it will run in the dark for 6 months! I didn't realize it, but Eco-Drive has been around since 1995.
Getting it registered for its 5 yr warranty was "interesting". All they had was goddamned QR codes for both the online manual as well as warranty registration. Its all about the PHOOOOOONNE!! Then they wanted my proof of purchase, so I grabbed the PDF from Amazon, and tried to upload it. It rejected the PDF!!! WTF?!? The site only accepted "image formats". Again, WTF? PDF is an image format, plus it is the STANDARD format for documents of all kinds. So I converted it to a PNG, and uploaded the thing. I can only assume that they assume that people would always take a picture of the paperwork with a PHOOOOOONNE.
I left them a polite message telling them how dumb that is - nobody will read it, and if they do, nothing will change - but it made me feel a bit better.