[Beginning today, I'll be writing about that eternal quandary we find ourselves in: whether or not to fork over hard-earned cash for something. And after much agonizing, once we do, to find out if we got the short end of the deal or not, whether or not we were treated properly and fairly in the process, and if we will be so treated after the purchase. Many of us have been screwed over buying something not worth getting in the first place, and to add insult to injury, treated like crap when we complain about it. Less often, we buy something so phenomenally wonderful that we turn into evangelists for the damn things.

This column will examine the whole consumer experience from soup to nuts. We'll snipe and shoot and study and praise and condemn and muse about all manner of consumer issues, from services to all manner of products, all from the point of view of the ordinary person.

Let me quickly introduce myself then. My name is Adel Gabot. My day job is Chief of Copy for ABS-CBN Publishing, which makes me Style and Grammar Police for a couple of dozen magazines ranging from gossip and entertainment rags to fashion and society titles. I am also a regular contributor of product reviews for a major newspaper, and a former editor of a tech magazine and a men's lifestyle magazine. I have also been a guest editor-in-chief for a variety of titles, including Golf Digest Philippines, PC Magazine Philippines and Maxim Philippines. More to the point, I am also an inveterate consumer with a snarky attitude, which I guess makes me suited to this task.

So before we begin this bumpy, snarky journey together, I'd just like to hit the ground running and encourage everyone to tell me about your particular experiences with commerce, capitalism and free enterprise in general. You can just vent and complain, or share your comments, suggestions and violent objections. You can reach me via email at Adel_Gabot-CTL@abs-cbn.com, and you can follow and respond to me at twitter.com/adelgabot.

Ok. Let's get this show on the road.]

I was recently at an event all about wristwatches. The expensive kind.

I've always been appreciative of timepieces, and have been watching watches my whole life. I don't ask much, I just hope to have something classy, reliable, respectable and vaguely ostentatious adorning my wrist someday. Aside from being able to tell the time, a good watch is a status symbol, a mark of success, and in the rarified air of boardrooms and high-end social events, practically a dress requirement. At this stratum, when meeting someone, you check out his business card first - and then his watch - before he passes muster.

I don't come from a background where I would eventually inherit a Rolex or a Patek Phillippe if I lived long enough. Neither are my resources of late such that I could just pick an Omega or a Breitling up at the shop, say, this weekend. For now, I must content myself for now with a respectable-looking Swatch. But at least I can say with pride that in my life, I've had the distinct pleasure of gawking at the very best, and last week I was not to be denied.

IWC Shaffhausen organized an intimate, basic watchmaking course for members of the press last Friday at The Renaissance Hotel to promote their brand. We got to take apart an IWC watch and then try to put it back together. It's a very gutsy move for them, mainly because we oafs could ruin a few million pesos worth of watches real easy.

The legendary watchmaker Kurt Klaus himself presided over our training. The guy is the equivalent of a rock star in watchmaking circles, Bono with a loupe instead of shades. Herr Klaus, an old man who looks not unlike Albert Einstein with his lab coat and mane of white hair, even talks like you imagine Einstein would. (Not an idle comparison in the least, because Herr Klaus in his field squarely matches Einstein's level of genius, having invented among other things IWC's revolutionary perpetual calendar module used in the famous Da Vinci model.)

But forget Kurt Klaus for the moment. The bigger thing is that this was IWC holding a watchmaking class! Rolex chronographs in their heart of hearts dream that in an alternate life they are IWC. No other company understands better what true luxury is. As one reviewer once wrote more eloquently than I ever could, "In this world where men eat their red meat dripping in robust sanguine glory, wear their Mark Powell suits like bespoke armor and exhale their Bolivars indoors, the International Watch Company reigns supreme."

The display area by the door holds a rack of IWC wristwatches, and I saunter over and pick one up, a nice thin piece with so delicate a spiderweb of gears and springs that you could actually see through it. I look interested and casually ask, "...and how much would this one be?"

The guy goes, "Sir, with a generous discount, that one would come to just a little over five."

I am a bit startled, immediately nervous that I was holding in my grubby hands a watch worth half a million pesos. I look at it, and get an even more chilling thought. Could it be?

I croak, "Five - ?"

" - million, sir," he says, helpfully.

I hand it back quickly and walk into the function room, chastened. And they trusted me to take one of these apart?

In retrospect, it wasn't too hard. Herr Klaus is a good instructor, walking around and hovering over our work, an Albert Einstein looking concernedly over our shoulders. As we each took apart a watch, removing gears, mechanisms, jewels and tiny screws using special tools with a loupe over our eye, and then gingerly putting the precious metal parts back together, I understood how these babies could be ridiculously expensive. At the end, when I nervously wound it up and with relief saw the movement start up again, I came away with an appreciation for how intricate and delicate a profession this is (and the sinking realization that my eyes are too bad and my hands too shaky to ever be good at it).

More so, I wondered what place such treasures IWC watches and similar shiny things have in a society like ours, where mere subsistence is a daily struggle for some. For me, getting to tinker with a device that dwells at the far end of the financial spectrum gave me perspective and grounding as to what the important things in life are. I can appreciate that for some of us it’s watches like these, or cars that go zero to 60 in four seconds. But for others, it's still a major struggle trying not to judge the existence of an object whose intrinsic value can feed two thousand families for an entire month, just strapped to someone's wrist and quietly and accurately counting down the hours and the minutes and the seconds for the next couple of centuries.

But then again, I said to myself, if some people can afford it, then why the hell not, right?

Later that day, I thought longingly of IWC's Grande Complication, which is made of 18 karat rose gold in a platinum case, of which only 50 are created a year, and costs almost P16 million. Yeah, who knows, right? Maybe someday even I might own one of those watches, I mused, as I stood on a street corner having a late merienda, biting into a fishball drenched with sweet-sour sauce and taking care not to let it drip on my old jeans.