Smashing a watch

It’s easy to smash a watch. I can do it and you can, too. If you are easily bored and hunger for variety, smashing a watch offers an unending plethora of possibilities. It will take you less than a minute to come up with ten radically different ways to smash a watch.

In contrast, there are limited ways to make a watch that works and works well. Making things that work is hard and often boring. You have to study and build on existing ideas. What you produce likely won’t be radical and new. It’ll just be a watch that works. And a watch that works well is just doing what it’s supposed to do. There’s nothing noteworthy about it, so people will only notice your handiwork when the watch does something it isn’t supposed to do. Most of the feedback you’ll get for making a watch is negative.

The smash is fun, it’s splashy, and even when the results aren’t what you expected or hoped for, you’re still getting to smash something and that smash will make it that much harder for the sincere goobers who want things to work. It takes seconds to smash a watch and a very long time to put it back together. And the good news is that the smash makes it harder for the person hired to fix your mess to succeed. Eventually people are going to shift their anger from you to your replacement. Yeah, the watch was smashed, but we hired that guy to fix it and it’s still broken. Maybe we should bring back the watch smasher. He got things done, anyway.