IWC - Magnetic Personality

A while ago I was fortunate (or deluded) enough to think that buying a new watch would be a wise move. In my defense I love watches and I have a humble group that I treasure because my father is a clock-obsessive and it's in my bones. He and I, aged five or so, would play shove ha'penny with a milk bottle across the kitchen table at tea-time and synchronise our watches to the pips at 5pm on Radio 4.

To this day I rate a watch's accuracy more highly than almost anything else. And so, my horror unfolding, I realised that the IWC Aquatimer Chronograph that I had bought was losing 2 mins 45 seconds on average per day.

This carried on for two months with me religiously timing its fecklessness with the sweet little atomic Gorgy clock homage app on the iPhone.

I was worried about the situation as, my dear father had told me a hundred time, even a cheapo quartz battery-operated watch will lose at most a second every 4-5 months and a decent, respectable manufacturer of automatic watch movements should build a watch that loses at most a second a month. What was up?

When I had gathered enough evidence I rattled it back to the shop, and from there they sent it to IWC and duly the response came back...

It had been magnetised. Once degaussed it now loses only a second each 5 weeks and I'm happy again. (But it remains a concern as my livelihood comes from moving around very large magnets in the shape of subwoofers and the like - how sensitive is it?)