Sorry. First, I thought that you set out to contradict, rather than agree with, the person you replied to (since that is common). Then I was thrown off by your

Sorry. First, I thought that you set out to contradict, rather than agree with, the person you replied to (since that is common). Then I was thrown off by your topic sentence, which seemed to lump together the two devices ("timers and stopwatches"). At this point, I think my reading accelerated to highway speeds and totally botched parsing the rest ;)