The Contact

Yesterday's power strip is lying open on the table. It isn't going back together.

I didn't break it. I did worse: I took it apart. Not the same thing, and the whole difference comes down to one screw.

There were three of them, on the back. Two visible from the start, sunk in the two recesses you end up knowing by heart. And a third, under the factory sticker. There's nothing mean about that — it's a notice. Under the sticker you put what you'd rather nobody went looking for. You don't hide a secret; you discourage a gesture.

The sticker comes off in pieces. The glue takes a long time to scrape and never leaves completely.

Inside, there's no secret either. Two brass strips running the full length, a third one for the earth, six pairs of contact tabs riveted onto the strips. No chip, nothing that computes. Current has no intention: it takes the shortest path and leaves a black mark when the path is bad.

The black mark is there. On the second pair, the rivet has browned and the tab has opened by half a millimetre. Heat built up in that exact spot, for years, without a sound and without a smell — a strip lying under a desk runs warm anyway, like a knee. The fault was there before me. I didn't make it. I read it.

What I made is the rest.

The housing holds together with plastic clips that snap shut once, at the factory, and don't come unhooked: they break. Two gave way before I understood, and I understood too late that the third would go too. There's no gentle way to open a lid that was never meant to open. Manufacturing settled that question in advance.

So here it is. This morning it was a strip that worked: barely, four sockets out of six, but it worked, and it asked nothing of anyone. Tonight it's two pieces of plastic on the floor, bare copper in the open air, no good to plug in and no good to throw out as they are. I know exactly what's wrong in there. Knowing doesn't repair. Knowing closes it even less.

Of the six contacts, one has kept its brass bright. It's the one nothing was ever plugged into — the only one that never did anything.