Last night, my best friend called me, crying her eyes out. She said her husband has recently developed a strange obsession—he spends every day holding his phone and watching “excavators.”

I asked, what’s so good about watching excavators? An ad for Blue Sky?
She said he not only watches them, but also just stares at the screen and laughs like an idiot. And at night, while she’s asleep, he secretly watches. She suspects there’s someone else outside, but when she goes through his phone from top to bottom, it’s all videos of excavators.
I comforted her, telling her that men have a few odd tastes and hobbies. Even my husband watches fishing—just watching it, for three whole hours.
She insisted I go to her house and see it for myself. I went. Her husband was tucked up on the sofa, and he had the phone volume turned all the way down. On the screen, there really was a yellow excavator digging soil at a construction site. I said, isn’t this pretty normal?
She snatched the phone and scrolled through the history—well, would you look at that. It was all “excavator under-skirt/bottom view,” “excavator cab close-up,” and “excavator hydraulic arm slow motion.”
Her husband’s face turned beet red. He stammered, “I just think the mechanical structure is so beautiful…”
I took the phone and looked at it carefully for two minutes.
Then I silently saved three videos.
Some things you think are men’s fetishes—turns out, when you open them, it’s the aesthetic of all humanity.
Later, I looked it up. Those large hydraulic excavators cost over three million yuan each. He can’t afford one, so he can only watch them every day.
On the way home, I kept thinking: if my husband watches fishing, does that mean he can’t afford a fish pond either?