22: What's the point of ….

This is the first in an occasional series where I intend to point out anomalies, paradoxes and just strange things which I observe in the human bean arena.

Today, I ask “What’s the point of .... “ - jigsaws.  Not the tool for cutting shapes out of wood -  but the result. I suppose I should have used the full name ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’.

Someone uses the aforesaid (big word for a little dog, eh) wood shaping tool to cut a piece of wood with a picture somehow printed on it or stuck to it, into a series of shapes which are, by the very nature of the cutting process, interlocking.  They then put the pieces in a bag and put the bag into a  box which has the same picture on it and sell the resulting package to bored people - and, in the current pandemic, there are plenty of those.

The bored, buyers then spend some time re-assembling the pieces, re-interlocking them, to re-create the picture.

Why?

Your guess is as good as mine. There is little skill involved, beyond some basic pattern recognition.  For a difficult jigsaw (where the picture has little differentiation from one section to another), the whole re-assembly process can take many hours (even days), yet the result is simply to create the picture they already have (on the box).

Worse!  Once they have re-assembled the picture, they break it up and put the pieces back in the bag and the bag back in the box.  Four years later (no, I can’t explain the delay but it does seem to be a regular step in the process) they take the box to a charity shop so that some other bored person can purchase it for a fraction of the original price.

If all this make sense to you, you are probably over 60 years old. If it doesn’t make any sense at all, you are probably a dog.