I spotted this spring’s first hitchhiker. I have hitch-hiked only once: I spent one New Year’s Eve at my friend’s childhood home in the middle of the Finnish countryside. Her parents had left for someplace else and we had the whole house for ourselves. As all of us were students, we had a limited budget for the celebrations. Yet, we had decided to have a meal including avocados. Such a great idea in the cold North when the nearest bigger supermarket with bearable avocados was several kilometres away and there was no car available.
Not to worry! My friend had a plan to get the avocados from a bigger supermarket. In order to make it to the store, we crafted a large cardboard sign with the supermarket name on it and walked by the highway to wait for a free ride. In less than 5 minutes we were sitting in a warm car on our way to buy avocados.
Lately I have been reading about bricolage, a concept introduced by Levi-Strauss in 1960’s for anthropology. Bricolage activity includes accomplishing things with whatever one has at hand. Currently my interests are in organisational bricolage where the organisational culture takes advantage of unexpected possibilities and resources. Still, I cannot avoid identifying some of my close friends and colleagues as bricoleurs aiming to achieve their goals with little resources.
My avocado friend is known for her ability to create an event out of from (almost) nothing. She has an incredible network of people who have access to various resources, like a sauna in a remote island in front of Helsinki. Moreover, she uses these connections in order to create something unique.
In addition to the organisational applications, bricolage can be used for something very ordinary. Like hitch-hiking to the supermarket for avocados in the middle of the winter. Or at least very ordinary for some people!
Eeva Houtbeckers 
Don’t understand at all these kind of manic people running and hitch-hiking around after some green fruits that are never mature enough on these latitudes…. huh 😉 Though some wise bricoleur has invented how to get an avocado more mature: put it into a plastic bag with an apple! Or was it a tomato? Better you put both of them.
Oh, but we were young and foolish and did not have the wisdom of maturing avocados. I’m sure the bricoleurs in question have learned this wise trick by now.