Do you have the status of the daylight?

It's hardly my place to tell other people how to spend their money. If you want to fill your home with expensive art and take luxurious vacations, more power to you. If you want to pamper yourself with lavish meals, well, I'm sure that steak was totally worth $150. And if you want to spend your hard-earned cash putting spinning rims on an otherwise stock Toyota Camry, well, go find your inner Sprewell, baby.
There comes a time, though, when you start to feel like the super-rich are just messing with the rest of us. A time, for example when you see something like Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome's Day&Night watch.
Now, I can appreciate a nice watch. I could have spent $5 at a drugstore when I bought my last watch but I didn't. I wanted something nicer. I didn't get anything extravagant. It looks nice, but when you get down to it it's just a way to tell time, something I figure is an important feature of any watch.
The folks at Romain Jerome appear to disagree. Their new showpiece, which at $300,000 costs as much as a pretty decent house in this market, will not tell you whether you're running late for your dentist's appointment or your tee time at the club. It doesn't have a calculator or a Dick Tracy-style radio or even anything to show you the date. It just tells you whether the sun is up.
And according to Reuters, the time — er, daypiece? — sold out within 48 hours of its launch.
It's an admittedly striking watch, presuming you like the "left to rust for three years in the bottom of a rain barrel look. But is a pitted, grimy-looking exterior really enough to explain why people are dropping the equivalent of a nice split-level on a piece of jewelry that tells them something they should be able to figure out simply by opening their eyes.
I can see how the Day&Night watch might be useful for a race of well-to-do mole people, but is this really a reasonable purchase for any of us who lives in the surface world?
To be fair, the watch apparently uses something called Tourbillon movement, a complicated mechanical something-or-other designed to counteract the effect of Earth's gravity on the watch's accuracy. Which means it can tell you with astounding precision whether there's enough light out for you to see your wrist in front of your face.
What is the justification for this extravagance? Romain Jerome chief executive Yvan Arpa told Reuters it's because people want a trophy. And what better way to tell everyone around you you have more money than you could possibly spend than spending more than a decade's worth of minimum wage salary on the equivalent of a window?
I'll tell you what, ridiculously rich people of the world — if you really want to show off, you can hire me. I'll give you my cell phone number and guarantee I'll pick it up any time, day or night. If you're ever uncertain whether the sun is up, you call me and I, using a series of complex mathematical computations — or maybe Google Maps — will tell you whether you should be eating breakfast or dinner. And I'll do it all for the bargain price of $250,000.
How can you beat that?