I Wear My Watch on the Wrong Wrist

A short story about an odd quirk of mine.

I am mostly right-handed. Pretty much the only things I do left-handed are sports-related, like swinging a baseball bat. For a while as a teen, my father and I would go golfing at a local par-3 course, and I had to teach myself how to use right-handed clubs because we couldn’t afford to buy new left-handed ones.

All of that said, I wear my watch on my right wrist. This, according to common knowledge, is incorrect. Since my right hand is my dominant hand, I should wear my watch on my left wrist. It’s how the vast majority of people wear their watches — on their non-dominant wrist.

Well, I don’t, and the reason is a short but mildly amusing story, which I will now share.

When I was in middle school, I found a watch on the floor. It was a digital watch with a bunch of random features, like an alarm function and a stopwatch. For late-90s tech, it was pretty snazzy — at least I thought so, but I was in middle school, so lots of dumb things impressed me.

I spent a few days trying to track down the owner, with no luck. So, I started wearing it. I learned how to make it do all the various cool things that it could do. I set it to coincide with the school bell system to the second so I always knew when the bell was going to ring for any given period. I even set an alarm for the second that the final bell rang for the day to dismiss us.

I loved that thing. It was a fun little toy for me to play with, and in retrospect, it probably established my fixation on time and timeliness. I wore it for a few years until my parents, who noticed my obsession with it, bought me a nice analog one with a metal band. Except for a few years in the late 2010s, I’ve worn a watch ever since.

However, when I got that first digital thing back in middle school, I put it on my right wrist. I didn’t really think about it, aside from the fact that I figured that it should go on my dominant hand, and that was that. My parents either didn’t notice or didn’t comment about it for quite a few years, and when they finally asked me about it, I shrugged and said “I’ve always worn it on this wrist.” It’s not like anyone could stop me.

So, I’ve always worn watches on the wrong wrist. It’s just how I operate. Right now, I’ve got a nice analog watch with a basic date function and the old-style glowing hands so I can read it in the dark. It’s a solid metal number with a blue face and a silver metal band, and I love it. It lives on my right wrist, as with every other watch I’ve ever owned.

So yeah, in a nutshell, I’ve worn watches “wrong” my whole life because nobody told me I couldn’t. I don’t plan to change that now.

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