Yup, that was my motivation for rewriting the parent statement. Abstracting away the type of counter and just saying, "show the number only when you crossed it" basically.
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 ;)