In the jagged boulevards of Anthroxville, where the hustle buzzed with ever-tightening efficiency, a strange city-wide development has taken hold known as Flagrant frittering. Serving as the ultimate status signal, one will frit away their time in the face of others suffering more constrained circumstances (known in Anthroxville as tickers), who find themselves frantically checking their watch as if it were a bubonic boil, panting as they lurch about in attempt to juice every drop of value out of every fleeting moment. Try as they might, there just simply is never enough effing time. “Please sir, I’d like some more,” they cry out in vain at day's end as they take stock of all the obligations yet to be met, before passing out in a frazzled guilt-ridden stupor. Everything is pressing. Everything is urgent.

Some say that if you listen closely, you can actually hear a ticker tick-tock as they scramble about with mad swiveling eyes, ready to cuckoo at any given moment. Meanwhile, Flagrant fritters (fritters for short) have the privilege (and the audacity) of whiffling it away on the most trivial matters conceivable. It's a complete windup, and the more farcical and insulting to the lowly tickers, the better. For example, it is not unusual to see a fritter spend a whole afternoon tying a shoelace, a full evening licking a stamp, or an entire weekend deciding what they’d like to order while sitting in a restaurant, such as Edison Upskirt’s Upskirt Nosher. Time is never of the essence for such a specimen. They are never late, nor early. They can do anything or nothing, all day, all week, all year, if they so wish. It simply doesn’t matter.

As one of the first to observe the phenomena, Johann Underbelly, formulated a succinct equation: Time = k / Complexity. Here, 'k' stands as a constant, while 'Complexity' gauges the intricacy of a given task. Johann's insight was clear: the simpler the task, the longer the duration,  increasing in an inverse proportion to its complexity. Naturally, few things are more maddening to those on a tight schedule than this flagrant display. Jasper Skint is a great example of this, with his mastery in the art of aimlessly naffing about. Others, who don’t have the dedication or wherewithal to follow in Jasper’s well-naffed footsteps look towards other means to demonstrate their status to tickers and other fritters. This is where the anthropomrophic furry koala bear, Fabia Dinkplop, comes into play.

While for many, necessity is the mother of invention, in Fabia’s case, it is triviality. Her pointless creations were spectacles—jigsaw puzzles of mechanics that often served no practical end. Frivolous and impractical by design, her contraptions consist of an elaborate series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggering the initiation of the next, eventually resulting in achieving a desired and nugatory end. For example, Dinkplop’s famous Page-turner involves 14 different triggered reactions, including various levers, ramps, sprockets, wheels, and pulleys, that, after a two-minute performance, might (or might not) turn a book's page. But its very inefficacy made it the toast of Anthroxville's elite, with luminaries like Gloria Widdershins, Graffen Gruntsqueeze, Oswald Corkage, and Tiffany Taradiddle making use of it every day in one of the most overt and conspicuous showings of frittering known in Anthroxville. Its debut sent waves of incredulous gasps throughout the tickers, before they had to scramble back to whatever it was they were doing and make up for the time they'd spent gasping. 

Another of the furry koala bear's inventions giving the common ticker rage-induced hemorrhoids is the Pocket-picker—not least because it was deployed against them in some kind of class-conscious jape. Inspired by the famed fingersmith, Binky Pettifogger, it was a 22-step rigmarole, which, if all went well (a rarity), would take four leisurely minutes to pick a pocket. More often than not, the result was comedic rather than criminal. But the intent was clear—to fritter flagrantly and to...