Not sure if this is even interesting, but I remembered this recently and now it’s been stuck in my head.

A few years ago I worked for a couple of months at a small watch assembly facility in Switzerland.

I won’t say where exactly. Partly because of paperwork I signed when I started, and partly because I honestly don’t know how much of this I’m allowed to talk about.

The work itself wasn’t particularly exciting.

Most of the pieces arrived almost finished. At my station we did a very small part of the final assembly. In my case, mostly fitting the hands, checking their alignment and passing the piece on.

There was one client, though, that was treated differently. We were never told who they were. Normally you’d have some kind of client reference on the paperwork. With these pieces there were just numbers.

Before working on them we had to clean the workstation again, even if it had already been cleaned. New gloves every time. Every piece had to be signed in and out. Phones weren’t allowed anywhere near that part of the room. None of this seemed THAT strange at first. Expensive watches, confidentiality, whatever. What I found strange was how little we were supposed to know. People at different stations weren’t supposed to talk to each other about these pieces.

I once asked an older woman I worked with if she knew who the client was. She looked at me for a second and said:
“You only need to know your part.”

I laughed because I thought she was joking. She didn’t laugh. There were also certain pieces that came through separately from the others. Whenever one of those arrived, a supervisor stayed in the room until we were finished. If anything was wrong with it — even a tiny mark or something slightly out of alignment — we weren’t allowed to fix it ourselves. It would be documented, removed from the tray and taken away. I never saw one of those pieces come back.

The weirdest thing is that I don’t actually remember what most of the watches looked like anymore. But I remember a number. 1882. I saw it repeatedly. On paperwork. On some of the internal labels. And I’m almost certain I once saw it engraved extremely small somewhere on one of the pieces, although this was years ago and I don’t want to pretend my memory is perfect. At the time I assumed it was just a client code or a reference number. Maybe it was.

I left after a few months and basically forgot about the whole thing. Recently something reminded me of that job and I tried searching for the number, but obviously searching “Swiss watch 1882” gives you a million unrelated things.
So now I’m curious.

Does 1882 mean anything specific in watchmaking?
Or was it probably just an internal reference that meant absolutely nothing outside that facility?