Puttering Along

I am not good at doing nothing. Sitting idle isn’t for me. I’m not happy unless I’m doing something.
Hearing that, you might think that I’m a paragon of productivity; a man on the move; someone who gets things done. You would be wrong.

I’m a putterer.

While some men invest their energy in creating vast business empires or building monumental bridges, I can happily spend an entire day trying to get just the right wallpaper for my computer desktop. To the casual observer, it looks like I’m hard at work, hunched over my desktop focused on the screen with the intensity of a hunting tiger. In reality, I’m carefully weighing whether I want the AC/DC logo or the kitties frolicking among the daisies as my background.

Looking genuinely busy while accomplishing nearly nothing is the key to a really effective putter. If it looks like you’re idle, somebody is going to come along and insist that you accomplish real work. This is especially true at your job.

If your are expected to make something tangible — a new car, a multi-story skyscraper, your bed — it’s hard to get away with puttering. No matter how good you are at pretending to work, at the end of the day someone is likely to notice that the car is nowhere to be found, the skyscraper isn’t any taller, and the bed is still a mess.

On the other hand, if you have a job where you sell things, buy things, process things, sell things bought or processed, buy things sold or processed, or process things bought or sold, puttering is practically a survival skill. Imagine a busy office in the land of cubicle-dwellers; picture them at their desks busily tweaking spreadsheets to produce aesthetically pleasing charts. Now picture that same crew at their desks busily re-arranging the icons on their desktops into aesthetically appealing patterns. Can you see any difference? Of course not! In a computer-intensive environment, puttering and working look exactly alike.

It is a little known and one-hundred-percent imaginary fact that the our modern word “computer” is a corruption of the medieval Latin word “computter” which meant “appearing to copy a page of text in the scriptorium while actually staring out the window and wondering when Gutenberg was going to get around to modernizing the whole business of producing books.” From those humble, low-tech beginnings, guys have found innovative technological solutions to the vexing question of how best to putter.

For my father’s generation, puttering meant working on cars. Guys would go out and buy a beaten-up, rattletrap car and endlessly obsess about the parts they planned to replace. Whole gangs of them would hang out in garages comparing the merits of various carburetor configurations, cylinder counts and compression ratios with the kind of single-minded intensity you expect to see in world-class athletes, virtuoso musicians and serial killers.

These guys rarely accomplished much in the way of actual automotive maintenance because they had learned two of the key skills required for a really good putter; planning and complaining that you don’t have the right tools. Planning is great because it delays the time until you have to figure out how to appear to be doing actual work. You can always tell when a guy is in the planning stage because he says something like, “I’m planning to remodel the house.”

Then he’ll go on to describe some improbable series of home improvements which will include moving load-bearing walls, re-routing the plumbing and possibly relocating the entire house to a better neighborhood in an different city in a distant state. When it comes time to act, the guy can’t pull this off any more than he could push a lima bean up the side of Everest with his nose. Which is where the second, and most important puttering skill comes into play; pretending to need a tool that you don’t have.

This is a lot more convincing if the guy in question first drags out several other tools in a meaningful way, possibly going so far as to put down protective drapes and surround the work area with yellow warning tape. Next he frowns at his tools and scratch his head for a while until someone notices that he’s deep in thought. When they ask what’s wrong he’ll reply, “Well, to do this right, I really need a number twenty-three left-threaded thermally-resistant bead inducer. All I’ve got is a twenty-one. I could probably make it work, but the job just wouldn’t be done right and on a job like this it’d be a shame to cut corners. Guess I’ll have to wait until I have the tool.”

If somebody suggests that he could buy the necessary tool he’ll shrug and point out that it’s expensive and hardly worth wasting that much money on a one-time job. Then he’ll putter the rest of the day putting the tools away.

If someone (say his long-suffering wife, for example) convinces him to go to the hardware store for the tool, he’ll be gone for hours. While he’s considering the tool in question, some other guy — who is also puttering — will wander by and offer an unsolicited opinion. “You planning major construction? Then you don’t want to get that one. I had one just like it and it broke in less than a day. Took most of the living room wall with it. You wouldn’t believe the mess. Eventually I had to tear down the whole house!”

Since they’re obviously both veterans of the home improvement wars, they’ll start swapping war stories until the store closes and it’s too late to buy anything. Whenever you see guys talking — in a hardware store, road construction site, or the floor of the U.S. Senate — you can bet they’re trading improbable tales of things they did or things they want to do. It may not be productive, but it’s a great way to putter.