I remember a full-page ad -- probably in The New Yorker -- for a watch which had its face rotated clockwise by 90 degrees.  The photo showed a debonair young professional leaning his head on his hand, in a pose of arrogant relaxation, his elbow on a conference room table.  The watch face was on the inside of his wrist -- people don't do that anymore with their smart watches, I am just realizing -- and because the face was lined up parallel with his arm, so to speak, that is because the diameter from the 12 to the 6 was parallel to his arm -- he could read the time surreptitiously (without obviously looking at his watch), so he had superior power and knowledge in the meeting.

I realized I could do the same thing with my own watch just by setting it three hours fast.  It wasn't perfect -- 12 noon came out as 3:15, more or less, except that the hour hand was slightly forward, a quarter of the way to the next hash mark (my watch had mainly hash marks with four Roman numerals).  But it worked fine and it was fun to glance at the time in school that way.

My father saw my watch one day on the counter and asked whether it had stopped.  I explained what I'd done and he expostulated with me against it.  What if other people were trying to figure out the time from my watch?  This seemed to me to be going far to seek disquietude, but he insisted.  Anyhow, it obviously didn't matter.  I could tell the time even if the watch was set in a normal fashion, and of course in class you also just looked at other people's exposed watches when you needed to know but didn't want the teacher to know you needed to know.  (Which meant, I guess, that my father was right.)