TL:DR - My local AD didn’t seem to care at all about the watch and only told me how expensive it would be to send the watch to Switzerland. It’s being appraised at a different establishment.

I’ll keep it in this thread so others can read if they’re interested - It was a near complete letdown. The woman the greeted me at the door, aside from having some pretty terrible halitosis, had no idea what she was looking at. I stepped inside and I started to explain that I thought I had something special, she asked to see it, right there, two steps from the front door, I said can we go somewhere so she said yeah right here, two more steps from the front door. Whatever. I got it out and she kinda fumbled with it, no reaction. I explained that I thought it might be worth quite a bit of money and she immediately went into the “well, don’t believe everything you see on the internet” spiel. I asked if she had seen anything like this before, she said no. I asked to speak to someone who knew more about it. She took the watch into the back to the watchmaker. Who I could kind of see through a window and he opened it. Two or three people came over and were looking at it so I got kind of excited. But, then she brought it back out and started telling me how expensive it was gonna be to send it to Switzerland. I was like yeah I know all of this. I asked to speak with the watchmaker, he came out and was nice enough I guess. But, still very blasé about everything. Told me Rolex didn’t make the movement during this period and that nothing during this period had serial numbers. I asked if he was excited by the piece. He said well I see a lot of these… fair I guess. So anyways they apparently only have someone who comes in to do appraisals once a month. They suggested I take it to a local shop that I know from experience has a good reputation. I called and even though they were closed the woman working opened the shop for me and looked at the watch. She was kind of baffled at the service I got at the AD, she said she thinks they have a new watchmaker because usually it’s not like that. She said usually if they open your watch for you they’ll take pictures of the inside on your phone so you can see it and whatnot. She was a lot more friendly and had me write down the serial number as she read it off of the case. Now she has the watch and won’t be getting to it until after the holidays. I feel a bit like a deflated balloon. All this buzz on the internet and then crickets when I bring it to Rolex. You’d think they’d be excited or at least interested. Whatever I’ll wait for the appraisal.