Puns & Wordplay Quote by Rod Schmidt

A perfectly dumb little miracle of office-era surrealism: the joke lands because it treats a metaphor like a work task. “Time to spare” is a dead idiom, something you say to sound in control of your day. Schmidt forces it through the machinery of the mundane - a Xerox machine, the emblem of bureaucratic repetition - and comes out with a literal “spare” copy. The laugh is the snap you feel when language stops being background noise and becomes physical again.

The intent isn’t just wordplay; it’s a tiny critique of the productivity fantasy. If time is the problem, we keep reaching for tools, hacks, and devices as if the right button will duplicate the one thing that can’t be duplicated. The Xerox detail matters: this isn’t science fiction cloning, it’s cheap replication, the kind you do at work while pretending it’s urgent. The subtext reads like a wink at the culture of busyness, where we’re surrounded by systems built to multiply documents, emails, and meetings, yet somehow the one resource we want most remains scarce.

Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century sensibility: copy machines, cubicles, and a growing suspicion that “efficiency” often just accelerates the treadmill. The watch is both personal and tyrannical - strapped to you, measuring you - and the act of xeroxing it is a fantasy of rebellion that’s also tellingly compliant. You don’t smash the clock. You duplicate it. That’s the joke’s bleak little aftertaste.