Describe Harris's attempt in making scrambled eggs. What trait of character is revealed here?

This incident happens in Chapter XI of Three Men in a Boat. Harris is the kind of person who makes the simplest acts more complex than they need to be. He’s also stubborn enough to think that he knows quite well how to do many things. The reality is that he doesn’t know how to do these things at all. He does such a terrible job that eventually someone else must intervene, if the...

This incident happens in Chapter XI of Three Men in a Boat. Harris is the kind of person who makes the simplest acts more complex than they need to be. He’s also stubborn enough to think that he knows quite well how to do many things. The reality is that he doesn’t know how to do these things at all. He does such a terrible job that eventually someone else must intervene, if the task is to be completed at all. Here on the boat, Harris sets out to make scrambled eggs for breakfast. But whatever can go wrong, does. He has trouble breaking the eggs so that they land in the frying pan and not on his trousers. He burns his fingers every time he touches the pan. In the end:

There seemed so little to show for the business. Six eggs had gone into the frying-pan, and all that came out was a teaspoonful of burnt and unappetizing looking mess.

Harris covers his lack of culinary talent by blaming the frying pan and saying that the process would have gone better if they had better equipment. The narrator is enough of a friend that he says they “decided not to attempt the dish again until we had those aids to housekeeping by us.” Surely he knows that no change of equipment will help Harris successfully make three dishes of scrambled eggs.

Earlier, in Chapter III, the narrator sees a resemblance between Harris’s approach to challenges and those taken on by his Uncle Podger, who ran into a host of difficulties when merely hanging a picture on the wall. After we read of the scrambled eggs incident, we can see this connection, too.