Science & Tech Quote by Dave Barry

Barry lands the joke by dressing a very modern habit in the stiff tuxedo of formal language. "I am not the only person" sounds like the start of a noble civic confession, the kind that promises a grand point about progress or productivity. Instead, he swerves into "diddling", a word that’s deliberately small, childish, and faintly illicit. It’s the perfect verb for the way many of us actually relate to technology: not as a tool for transformation, but as an endless fiddle box for procrastination, tinkering, and micro-distractions.

The line’s slyer move is the reflexive loop: "uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer". The object and the activity collapse into each other. The computer isn’t a means to an end; it becomes the end. That structure mirrors a cultural reality that was crystallizing as home PCs became common: people weren’t just writing documents or balancing budgets; they were customizing settings, organizing files, installing things, uninstalling things, and generally spending time maintaining the machine as a hobby in itself.

Subtextually, Barry is puncturing the tech gospel without sounding like a scold. He’s admitting complicity and inviting recognition: you, too, have spent an hour adjusting something that didn’t need adjusting. The self-mockery is strategic. It turns a critique of consumer-tech culture into a shared, slightly embarrassing wink about how quickly a "productivity" device becomes a highly sophisticated toy.