Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/28/watch-man-overjoyed-to-learn.html
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What a delightful West Fargo hippie.
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I hope they were able to give him some good advice on finding an auction house, assuming he opts to sell it.
Knowing me, I’d drop it trying to get it back into the box or leave it in the backseat of an Uber on the way home.
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From how it began I was worried that it was going to be a fake. But I loved his response.
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I just caught that on TV last night while flipping channels. It was pretty cool. I’m always fascinated by how things are valuated on Antiques Roadshow. Usually it’s some colonial furniture piece (“You can tell it was made by Josiah Floptick the Younger in Boston in 1782 because of the diameter of the knobs”) that’s worth $6M except that the poor sap who brought it in refinished it so now it’s worth $12.95.
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At the thrift store I frequent they sometimes bring out ziploc baggies of assorted jewelry and watches, with prices on each bag ($5, $10, $20) and you just have to buy semi-blind (no opening the baggies). I know some dealers come in there and just buy them all up, suspecting there will be one original Rolex in there to pay for the entire lot.
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I do this often. I seldom find anything worthwhile, but my wife and kids love costume jewelry.
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At used book sales people show up.with barcode scanners, hoping to win the jackpot. They just go through a pioe of books nky checking tge barcode. If the price provided over their phone is high enough for them, they grab it.
Of course, they still have to find a buyer for that price. And they miss valuable books that have no barcode.
One local book sale started pricing according to the internet, and I stopped going.
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Good for him. Couldn’t have been fun times back then when he served, the shit he must have seen…
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Oh, this has been going on for years now, since at least 2008. I see several “book guys” get into near-fistfights at this same store.
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Who the living fuck has an extra $700,000 laying around for the purchase of an antique watch? This right here is what the 0.1% do with all the money they steal from the rest of us. It’s obscene.
(Sorry. I know this is supposed to be a feel good story about the guy who bought it from the PX and stored it all those years. And good for him. But fuck the obvious income inequality that underlies this “windfall.”)
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Look at it this way. This watch is a way to get that 700 grand out of rich jackhole’s account back into circulation. I guarantee you this dude will spend it in all sorts of good ways for the economy, as opposed to it sitting in rich jackhole’s offshore account. And rich jackhole gets to sit on a watch he won’t wear, and he dies the same as all of us.
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Some people have serious hobbies when it comes to collecting, especially chronographs. They’re a good investment because their value doesn’t drop and for some its definitely a status symbol to wear. I can’t imagine being rich enough to drop that kind of cash on a watch of all things, but good for this dude to keep such a rare watch by happenstance. He seems like a really cool dude and i’m sure he deserves whatever he gets if he were to sell it.
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In the late '90s there were regular shipments of new math books to a bookstore near Harvard, being sold at pennies on the dollar. The vultures would show up and buy anything yellow (i.e. by the publisher Springer), and so as not to wait on the store personnel, would bring their own boxcutters. It was an extremely tense scene.
After the store was mysteriously shut down I learned that the books had regularly “fallen off the back of a truck”, explaining their curious pricing.
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I seen one book buying company offer “free” scanners to the library if they will scan all their book sale books and cherry pick them for the company before the public sale 
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Yard sales and family-run estate sales still make for great book treasure hunts. I feel like I’m cheating thru any other route. Im ignorant enought to be guessing & buying what i like, so if I happen on a windfall, i wont have purposely cheated the seller version of, well…me.
i think if i bought a yardsale book, watch or whatev for near nuthin, then found out that thing was worth $700,000, i reckon id try to find my seller and…GLOAT! Nonono jk, id break bread with him and make it right.
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Spoiler alert…
Dude fell to the ground, man! At $400k! When the appraiser guy took it up to 500 to 700k, I though the old hippie was gonna boing-boing around the room like woody woodpecker or tigger or some such cartoon.
Seriously, though, good for him, he does seem like a cool dude. And he reminds me of a cousin of mine, enlisted in the early 70s, USAF, stationed in Thailand.
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Dude is definitely former CIA… Air Force, SCUBA, munitions, mentions flying on Air America.
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Maybe there’s more to that watch than meets the eye. “Here’s a little something we learned in CIA”
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