For many years, the staple of our industry was the highly-trained and respected watchmaker. Today, however, he is treated as a second-class journeyman.
I began in this industry at the side of my late father, a holocaust survivor who came to Australia as a displaced person, with no English and no trade, and who was taught the basics of watchmaking at RMIT.
There, my dad developed a love of horology. Dad soon grasped skills that left tradesmen in awe of his expertise for years to come. Growing up, with my father as a major influence, it feels like I have been repairing watches forever.
I grew accustomed to visiting material houses such as Precision Watches, (now the Swatch Group), Rose Bros, Jack Segal and Roche Burmeister - all household names in our once great trade at one time - and I relished the buzz of these dusty warehouses filled with spare parts and watchmakers.
Sadly, many of these houses now do not exist. With the advent of quartz watches, most could not survive holding the amount of parts needed to repair the more modern timepieces.
When I was 15 years old, I could not wait to become apprenticed to my father - this lasted about a year. A typical teenager, I thought I knew more than my dad, and transferred my indentures to another great watchmaker named Frank Sanders with whom I completed my apprenticeship.
Today, my love is still selling, repairing and servicing watches, and I spend many hours at my workbench restoring watches and clocks deemed un-repairable by the very companies that sold them.
I have never said no to a repair and the skills taught to me have left me in good stead.
It's sad that there are very few watchmakers left and a major reason for this is the inability of the watch companies to supply adequate spare parts.
I think they would rather sell a new watch than repair a cherished family heirloom - a process accelerated by those watchmakers who advise their clients that their watches are not worth repairing.
There is also not the amount of generic watch movements there once was, and incompatibility issues mean watches often only respond to their own brand of specific parts, especially with casing components to maintain the water resistant qualities of most watches.
So while most are more than willing to sell new watches, supplying spare parts is a necessary evil.
Is this happening because of the lack of qualified watchmakers, or is it that they just don't care? Some companies are extremely helpful and go out of their way to source parts. Others just keep putting more barriers in our way.