I think watches are badly designed. I always find that when I want to know the date, it is quarter past something and I can't see what the date is. I then try again about an hour later and I still can't see it. Stupid it is. If I was designing watches I'd put the date at the quarter to bit instead and the problem would be totally eradicated. I find it strange that wristwatches have only been around for a hundred years or so because as far as I know, time has been around for a long time - see the clue is in "a long time"!! I wear a watch so I find that time is always against me.
Of course, early wrist-watches weren't as spangly, dazzily and wrist-watchy as they are today. Early forms of the watch were much like incompetent Al Qaeda terrorists in that a lot of them had no hands and time telling became a fun guessing game which people would spend minutes or perhaps hours playing - nobody really knew how long. The next phase of wrist-watches only went up to 10 hours which unfortunately meant that people would spend 2 hours in the morning and night in a timeless void probably floating around in some parallel universe somewhere or other if you believed in all that. If you didn't believe in that kind of thing you just couldn't tell what the time was for a couple of hours. We used to have a grandfather clock in my house which we'd converted out of some old disused grandfather who was just lying around in the loft doing nothing apart from moaning.
I've done a bit of research into the mathematics of time and I can report that it was very boring and you won't be interested in it at all. It certainly didn't have anything to do with me not understanding it. All I do know is... At some point in your life, you get to a certain age where despite pentapeptides and after accepting defeat to Olay's seven signs of aging you suddenly find yourself standing in a queue at the post office moaning about your failing body and "kids nowadays" or you inexplicably wake up and find yourself sitting on a coach on a trip to the seaside surrounded by other biddies, before falling back to sleep again 5 minutes later.