Author: MaryClare Macfie

You put your hands under it. Nothing.

You move them slightly left. Nothing.

You wave. You do a small dance. You present your hands like an offering.

The faucet does not believe in you.

The Sensor Search

There’s a tiny black dot somewhere. That’s the eye. You have to find the eye.

Sometimes it’s on the front of the spout. Sometimes it’s underneath. Sometimes it’s on the back wall, six inches away, for reasons known only to the manufacturer.

You bring your hands within a millimeter of the metal. Water erupts at full pressure and ricochets off the sink, off your hands, and onto your shirt in a straight horizontal line at exactly waist height.

The Duration Problem

It runs for 1.4 seconds.

That is not enough time to wet your hands, let alone rinse soap. You have to re-trigger it four times, and each trigger requires the full search-and-wave ritual again.

You are now doing a repetitive gesture at a wall fixture like you’re casting a spell.

The Soap Dispenser Situation

The soap dispenser has its own sensor, calibrated by a completely different philosophy.

It gives you either nothing or a volume of soap appropriate for washing a horse. There is no in-between.

You now have too much soap and a faucet that gives you 1.4 seconds of water. These systems were not designed to coexist.

The Neighboring Sink

The person next to you approaches their faucet, and it turns on before their hands arrive.

Theirs runs continuously. Theirs is warm. Theirs is a good faucet.

You consider moving over. But they’re still there. And moving sinks mid-wash is a strange thing to do in front of a stranger.

The Paper Towel Sequel

You finally get your hands clean. Now you need to dry them.

The paper towel dispenser has a sensor too. It also does not see you.

You wave. Nothing. You wave lower. Nothing. You have wet hands and no options.

Someone else walks up and it dispenses immediately for them.

The Hand Dryer Alternative

The Airblade. 400 mph of ambient bathroom air.

It’s loud enough that conversation stops in the entire room. It dries the top of your hands and leaves your palms damp indefinitely.

You give up at 60% dry and wipe the rest on your jeans, which is what you were always going to do.

The Escape

You reach for the door and remember: you just washed your hands and the handle is the point of failure in the entire system.

You use your elbow. You use your sleeve. You do a whole maneuver.

Someone sees you do it. They understand. They’re going to do the same thing.

We’re all in this together, waving at walls, damp, defeated, hoping the sensor sees us next time.

Page one. A drawing of a person smiling. Two arrows. A wrench.

That’s the entire page. That’s your guidance.

The Parts Inventory Lie

There’s a diagram of every screw at actual size, which is genuinely useful and the only good idea in the whole document.

You lay them all out on the floor. You count.

You have 14 of screw type C. The diagram says 12. You have 3 of screw type F. It says 4.

You now have a surplus and a deficit and no explanation for either. You will discover the missing F at the end, inside the box, in the styrofoam, after everything is done.

The Wordless Warning

There’s a panel with a red X over a cartoon person doing something.

You cannot determine what they’re doing wrong. They appear to be standing near the furniture. Is standing near it prohibited? Are you supposed to build it remotely?

There’s another one that clearly shows a person needing a second person. You do not have a second person. You proceed alone, in defiance of the pictogram, and the pictogram will be proven right.

The Panel Orientation Crisis

Panels A and B are identical except for the placement of one pre-drilled hole on the inside face.

You cannot see the inside face while holding it. You commit. You screw in six screws.

Then you flip it and the hole is on the wrong side.

You have to undo it. And the particleboard has already accepted those screws once, so the second time in the same hole is 40% less grippy forever.

The Allen Wrench Experience

They gave you a 2-inch L-shaped piece of metal for 34 bolts.

The short arm gives you no leverage. The long arm gives you no clearance. There is no third arm.

You turn each bolt in one-eighth rotations, repositioning your hand each time, for twenty-five minutes. Your palm develops a permanent hexagonal impression.

The Step You Skipped

Step 7 said to insert something before attaching the back panel.

You did not insert it. You attached the back panel.

You realize this at step 19. Steps 8 through 19 must now be reversed.

You consider whether the piece was really necessary. It was a cam lock. It was structural. You reverse it all.

The Wobble

It’s done. It stands up. It holds things.

It has a wobble. Not a dangerous one — a personality one. It leans slightly to the right, forever.

You could disassemble it and find the loose bolt. You will not. You have decided the wobble is a feature now.

The Leftover Hardware

Three screws remain. Two washers. One small plastic thing shaped like nothing.

Everything is assembled. Everything functions. These parts had no home.

You put them in a Ziploc and put the Ziploc in a drawer.

They join the chain, the pen, the USB drive, and the Tupperware lid.

The drawer grows. The drawer is patient. The drawer waits.

You had a plan. Ice on the bottom, drinks on top, sandwiches in a sealed bag, everything cold and organized for eight hours.

That plan lasted forty minutes.

It’s now a lukewarm aquarium and your sandwich has drowned.

The Loading Philosophy

You loaded it in the correct order at 7 AM. You were proud of the order.

Then someone needed a drink from the bottom.

They excavated. They removed and replaced nothing correctly. The ice is on top now. The sandwiches are load-bearing. The structural logic is gone forever, forty minutes in.

The Bag Betrayal

You put the sandwiches in a Ziploc, and you sealed it, and you pressed the line to make sure.

Water has still gotten in. It always gets in. There is no such thing as a waterproof Ziploc in the presence of melted ice — physics simply declines to cooperate.

The bread is translucent on one side. You eat it anyway. You’re four hours from anything.

The Cold Water Hand Plunge

Every retrieval requires submerging your entire forearm into 34-degree water.

You feel around blind. You touch three things. None of them are what you want. Your hand loses feeling.

You pull out a lemon. Nobody brought a lemon. There has never been a lemon.

The Lid Situation

Somebody left it open for a while. Nobody will admit to this.

Or somebody closed it wrong, and it’s been ajar the entire drive, and the latch — the one latch that mattered — has been quietly not latched since the driveway.

There’s also a hinge that broke in 2021 and now the lid only stays on if you set it down at a particular angle, which everybody in the family knows and nobody explains to guests.

The Drain Plug

There’s a drain plug. It’s the best feature of the cooler.

You’ve never used it. You don’t trust it. Once you open it, water goes somewhere, and “somewhere” is the trunk of your car or your friend’s patio.

So instead you carry the whole thing, sloshing, to a place where water is allowed, and dump it with your body weight, and it splashes on your shoes.

The Return Trip

It’s four times heavier going home than it was coming out.

Four cans left, no ice, and eleven pounds of water that has absorbed the ambient flavor of everything that was ever in there.

The Garage Phase

It goes in the garage. You will clean it later.

You will not clean it later.

Six Weeks Later

You open it.

There is a smell. It is not a food smell. It is not a water smell. It is something new, something that evolved in there, something that made choices.

There’s a single can at the bottom, floating, label peeled off.

You hose it out. You leave it open in the sun for two days. You buy a new one.

The old one stays in the garage. It’s a good cooler.

There’s a red badge on your phone app. It says 1.

It has said 1 for nine days.

You know it’s there. You’ve made peace with it. You will not be listening to it.

The Preview Gambit

The transcription gives you enough to triage without committing.

“Hey [Name] this is [garbled] calling from [garbled] just wanted to touch base regarding your [something] — give me a call back when you—”

That’s all you need. That’s an entire conversation. The voicemail has been functionally consumed without ever being played.

The Unknown Number Standoff

It’s a 404 area code. You don’t know anybody in Atlanta.

It could be a doctor’s office. It could be a scam. It could be a legitimate business calling about something legitimate.

The only way to know is to listen, and listening means 47 seconds of hold music and throat-clearing before anyone gets to a point.

You’d rather live in uncertainty.

The Scroll of the Damned

You open the voicemail tab and there’s a graveyard down there.

Fourteen old ones. Some from years ago. Some from people you talk to weekly, who left a voicemail one time in 2022 and never did it again.

There’s one you saved on purpose. You know which one. You’ll never delete that one.

There’s one that’s just 4 seconds long, which is somebody realizing they got voicemail and hanging up, and you’ve kept it, for no reason, forever.

The Generational Divide

Someone under 30 leaves a voicemail: never. Not once. Not for any reason.

Someone over 60 leaves a voicemail: always. Every time. Even if they also texted. Even if they’re going to see you in an hour.

“Hey, it’s Dad. Just calling. Nothing important. Call me back.” Four seconds. No information. Perfect.

The Callback Panic

You decide to call back. It rings.

You suddenly realize you don’t know what this call is about, who you’re talking to, or what you’re going to say.

You have not prepared. You are about to improvise a business conversation with a stranger about a topic you couldn’t name.

They pick up. You say “hey, I got a call from this number?” and hand them the entire burden of the conversation.

The One You Should Have Listened To

Somewhere in that stack of fourteen is one that actually mattered.

An appointment change. A confirmation number. A person you cared about telling you something.

You’ll find out about it six weeks later when someone asks “didn’t you get my voicemail?”

You did. You absolutely got it. You looked right at it.

The Solution

You’ll never fix this.

You will die with a red badge on your phone app, and it will say 1, and everyone will know exactly what happened.

You have the key. You are in the driver’s seat. You have a reservation and a destination and a schedule.

You cannot make this vehicle exist.

The Ignition Search

There’s no keyhole. There’s no obvious button. There is a fob in your hand that looks like a garage remote from 2004.

You press the brake and push the fob into a slot that turns out to be a coin tray.

You find a button that says START. You press it. Nothing. You press it eleven more times, faster each time, which is not how any machine has ever worked.

The Foot Discovery

Twenty seconds later you learn you have to have your foot on the brake.

The car starts. You feel a wave of relief and also a small collapse of self-respect, because you are 40 years old and you just needed four attempts to power on a Nissan.

The Gear Shift Interpretive Dance

It’s not a stick. It’s not a column shifter.

It’s a small toggle nub that springs back to center after every input, so you have no idea what gear you selected. You have to read a tiny illuminated letter on the dash to find out.

You aim for Reverse. You get Neutral. You try again. You get Reverse. You’ve been in this parking space for four minutes.

The Parking Brake Mystery

There’s a light on. It’s an exclamation point in a circle, which in car-language means either “parking brake engaged” or “brake system catastrophic failure.”

You look for a lever. There is no lever. There’s a small button somewhere near your left knee. You find it by touch, like reading braille.

The Mirror Situation

Adjusted for someone six inches shorter than you who apparently drove without looking behind them.

The controls are on the door. Or the dash. Or in a menu on the touchscreen, which requires you to navigate two submenus to move a mirror, which is a genuine crime.

The Wiper Incident

It starts raining. You reach for where the wipers are on your car.

You activate the high beams. Then the turn signal. Then you honk.

You honked at nobody, in a parking garage, in a car that isn’t yours. Someone looked.

You find the wipers. They come on at maximum speed, whipping frantically across a windshield with four drops on it, and you cannot make them slower for the next six minutes.

The Radio Ghost

Whatever the last renter listened to comes on at volume 26.

It’s either sports talk or something in a language you don’t speak or Christian rock, and it is very, very loud, and the volume knob is not a knob.

The Gas Cap Coin Flip

At the station: which side is the tank on?

There’s a tiny arrow next to the fuel gauge that tells you this. You have never once remembered to look at it before pulling in.

You pull in wrong. You have to reverse and loop the entire lot while someone waits.

The Return

You’ve finally learned the car. You know the wipers, the shifter, the mirrors, the radio. You and this car have an understanding now.

You return it at 6:00 AM in a dark garage and never see it again.

Next trip, it’ll be a different make, and you’ll start over from zero, pressing START with your foot off the brake, eleven times, faster and faster.

You laid down at 4:15 for twenty minutes.

You open your eyes. The room is orange. Or blue. You cannot tell which.

You do not know what day it is.

The Reboot Sequence

There’s a period — maybe eight seconds — where you have no identity.

You know you’re a person. You know you’re horizontal. That’s the extent of the file that loaded.

Then it comes back in chunks. Your name. Your house. The fact that you have a job. The fact that you were supposed to do something.

You still don’t know what time it is. You don’t know if that orange light is dawn or dusk. These are completely different situations and your body has no opinion.

The Clock Check

6:52.

AM or PM? The clock does not say. Clocks never say.

You check your phone. It says Wednesday. You were pretty sure it was Wednesday when you laid down, so either you slept a normal amount or exactly one full week.

The Physical Damage

Your mouth is a desert with a strange metallic tang.

One arm doesn’t work. Not asleep-tingly — genuinely non-responsive, a dead weight attached to you. You lift it with your other hand and set it on your chest like you’re handling someone else’s arm.

There’s a crease on your face from a seam in the couch cushion. It will be there for two hours. You will see people during those two hours.

The Guilt Arithmetic

You lost two and a half hours. You had plans for those hours.

You were going to answer emails. Do the dishes. Go for a walk. You were going to be a person with momentum.

Instead you’re sitting upright on a couch at 6:52 with one working arm, staring at a wall, waiting for your soul to fully re-dock.

The Wide-Awake Punishment

You feel fine now. Great, actually. Sharp. Refreshed.

That’s the trap.

Because at 11:40 PM you will be sitting up in bed, wide awake, brain running at full speed, calculating exactly how much of tomorrow you have already forfeited.

The nap has taken payment from tomorrow. The nap always collects.

The Vow

You tell yourself: no more late naps. Twenty minutes, timer set, on top of the covers, no pillow commitment.

You have made this vow before. You have made it dozens of times.

Two Days Later

4:15 PM. You’re just going to close your eyes for a second.

Just a second.

You wake up and the room is orange.

You want to make banana bread. You have three brown bananas and a deadline of tonight.

You search. You click the first result. You begin scrolling.

You will scroll for a long time.

The Childhood Section

“Growing up in the rolling hills of Vermont, my grandmother’s kitchen was always filled with the warm scent of cinnamon…”

Okay. Lovely. Genuinely, that sounds nice.

You scroll.

“…she taught me that baking is about patience. About presence. Every autumn, she and I would…”

There are three photos of a field. None of them contain banana bread.

The Photo Gauntlet

Twelve photos of the same loaf from twelve angles.

Loaf whole. Loaf sliced. Loaf on marble. Loaf with a linen napkin artfully bunched beside it for reasons of texture. Loaf next to coffee. Loaf with a bite taken out, styled by someone who did not take that bite.

Each photo has 200 words underneath it that say the same thing as the previous 200 words.

The Ingredient Interrogation

Then a section titled “Ingredients You’ll Need” that is not the ingredient list. It’s a paragraph about each ingredient.

“Flour — I like to use all-purpose, but you can use whatever you have!”

That’s it. That’s the whole entry. That information was already going to be in the recipe. It’s now taken up half a screen and a photo of a bag of flour.

The Ad Layer

An ad expands mid-scroll and moves the entire page. You lose your place.

A video player detaches and follows you down the page, muted, playing a clip of someone folding batter. You cannot close it. There’s an X but the X is 4 pixels and moves.

A newsletter popup arrives. “Wait! Don’t leave without my free guide!”

You have been on this page for four minutes and have received zero measurements.

The Jump to Recipe Button

There’s a button at the top. You missed it. You always miss it.

You scroll back up 4,000 pixels to find it. You click it. It bounces you to the recipe card.

You are here. After all of it, you have arrived.

The Recipe

It’s nine lines long.

Three bananas. Flour. Sugar. Egg. Butter. Baking soda. Salt. 350 degrees. 55 minutes.

That’s the whole thing. That was always the whole thing. That could have fit in a text message.

The Comment Section

You scroll down out of habit.

“Made this with applesauce instead of butter, coconut flour instead of flour, no sugar, and baked it in an air fryer. 2 stars, didn’t turn out.“

Someone else: “Can I make this without bananas?”

Someone else, from 2019: “Looks delicious, can’t wait to try!” — no follow-up, no verdict. They never came back. We’ll never know.

The Understanding

You know why the story is there. SEO. Word count. Copyright on the recipe text itself, which can’t be protected the way prose can.

You understand the incentives completely.

You resent it completely anyway.

The Bread

It comes out great. It’s excellent, actually.

Grandma from Vermont was right about the cinnamon.

You need to charge your phone. You have eleven cables in this house.

None of them are the right one, in the right place, at the right length, with a working end.

This is a math problem with no solution.

The Inventory

There’s the one in the bedroom, which is 4 inches too short, which means you have to hold your phone at a specific angle in bed like you’re reading a sacred text.

There’s the good long one. Nobody knows where the good long one is. Somebody took the good long one.

There’s a stack of three in a drawer that are all subtly the wrong kind — a generation behind, a different connector, or one that only charges and doesn’t transfer data, which you discover at the worst possible moment.

And there’s one with the outer casing peeled back, exposing colored wires. You still use it. You just don’t tell anyone.

The Wiggle Protocol

The cable works, technically. It works if you position it exactly right and then never move.

You plug it in. Nothing. You wiggle. Charging! You breathe. It stops.

You end up bending the cable at a 40-degree angle and wedging it against a book to hold the pressure. It’s charging. You built a small structure to make electricity happen.

The Brick Shortage

You have plenty of cables and zero wall adapters.

The bricks have all migrated somewhere — a suitcase, a car, a coat pocket, somebody’s overnight bag from a trip in 2023.

You’re now charging off your laptop’s USB port at a rate of approximately 1% per hour. It’s going down while it’s plugged in. You are losing.

The Car Cable

The car cable is the worst one. It’s always the worst one.

It’s the cheap gas-station replacement you bought in an emergency. It’s stiff. It’s the wrong length. It’s coiled around the gear shift like it lives there.

It charges slower than the phone drains while running maps. You arrive at your destination with less battery than you left with.

The Guest Request

Someone asks: “Do you have a charger I could borrow?”

You say “yeah of course!” with total confidence. Then you go on a nine-minute expedition through three rooms.

You return with a cable. It’s the wrong kind. You go back out. You return with a second cable. It’s also the wrong kind.

You have eleven cables and cannot service a single guest.

The Purchase Cycle

You finally buy a good one. Braided. Six feet. The nice brand.

It’s excellent for four months. Then the end starts getting finicky. Then it needs the wiggle. Then it joins the drawer.

The drawer has ten in it now. You’ll add this one. You won’t throw any of them out, because what if.

The Truth

Somewhere in this house is one perfect cable that works flawlessly at the ideal length in the ideal spot.

You will never find it. Someone in your household is using it right now and has no idea what they possess.

Someone says “let’s get a picture.”

This sentence launches a nine-minute operation involving eleven people, three phones, and a stranger who did not volunteer.

The Assembly

Everyone begins moving toward a vague center point. Nobody knows where the center point is.

Two people crouch. One person stands directly behind someone taller and disappears completely. Someone’s on the far left, half out of frame, holding a drink they’re now trying to hide.

“Squeeze in.” Everyone shifts two inches. Nothing improves.

The Photographer Problem

Whoever’s phone it is has to be in the photo, so they hand it to someone.

That someone does not know how this phone works. They’re a different operating system person. They can’t find the button. They take four photos accidentally while looking for the button.

They hold the phone at chest height, tilted up, which means everyone gets the nostril angle.

The Stranger Recruitment

Someone flags down a passerby. The passerby is gracious about it, which is the great unearned kindness of human society.

They take one photo. One. They hand the phone back with a smile and leave.

It’s blurry. Their thumb is in the corner. Somebody blinked.

You will never see this person again. You cannot ask for another. You thank them warmly and let them go.

The Blink Lottery

Ten photos taken. In every single one, exactly one person’s eyes are closed.

It’s a different person each time. It’s never the same person twice. The math on this should be impossible and yet it happens at every single group photo ever taken.

There is one photo where everyone’s eyes are open. In that one, someone is mid-sentence with their mouth in a shape that no human should be photographed in.

The Review

The phone gets passed around. Everyone examines the entire batch.

Each person is looking exclusively at themselves. Nobody is evaluating the photo. They’re evaluating one square inch of the photo.

“This one’s good.” — “No, delete that one.” — “I look insane in that.” — “That one’s fine!” — “It’s NOT fine.”

One person vetoes the objectively best photo because of their own arm. Everyone else has to live with it.

The Retakes

“One more, one more!”

Three more get taken. They’re worse. The energy is gone. Everyone’s face has settled into a tired approximation of a smile.

The good one was number four. It was always number four. You’ve all wasted seven minutes.

The Distribution

“Can you send that to me?”

Yes. Absolutely. Definitely.

It will not be sent. It will live on one phone, in one camera roll, unseen and unshared, until that phone is replaced and the cloud backup goes unqueried forever.

Two Years Later

Someone finds it while scrolling for something else.

They send it to the group text.

Everyone loves it. Everyone says “oh my god, look at us.” Nobody mentions their arm.

It was a great photo the whole time.

Six notes. That’s all you have.

You heard it in a grocery store in maybe 2011. Or a car commercial. Or a movie trailer for a movie you never saw.

Those six notes now live in your head rent-free and armed.

The Humming Phase

You hum it to yourself. Then you hum it slightly differently. Then a third way.

By the fourth attempt you’re no longer sure you’re humming the actual song. You may have invented a new song. You may be humming a slight variation of something else entirely.

The original is degrading in real time, like a photocopy of a photocopy.

The Lyric Fragment

There are words. Two of them. Maybe three.

It’s either “hold on tonight” or “hold on to light” or possibly “cold ocean light,” which makes no sense as a lyric but is now equally plausible.

You google all three in quotes. You get a Nickelback song, a wellness blog, and a poem.

None of these are it.

The Shazam Betrayal

You wait. Weeks pass. Then one day, in a Chipotle, it plays.

You fumble for your phone. You open the app. Your hands are not fast enough. Your phone wants a face scan. The face scan fails because you’re moving.

The app opens. It listens. The song is on its last eight seconds.

“No match found.”

Shazam has heard eight million songs and it has never heard this one. You are alone.

The Interrogation of Friends

You hum it at people. This is a hostile act and you don’t care.

“It goes like — da-DA-da-daaa-da-da? With like a synth thing?”

They stare at you. They say “is it that one song?” You say which one. They say they don’t know.

One friend confidently names a song. You look it up, full of hope. It is not it. It is not even close. You are now slightly angry at your friend.

The Playlist Deep Dive

You listen to 200 songs from that general era on 2x speed, scanning for the six notes.

You do this for an hour and a half on a Tuesday night. You are a grown adult conducting a forensic audio investigation into a jingle.

You find nothing. You find three songs you’d forgotten you loved, which is a nice consolation prize but not the point.

The Dormancy

It goes away. Months pass. You forget entirely.

Then you’re pumping gas and someone drives by with a window down and you catch two seconds of it and the entire obsession reboots from a cold start.

The Ending That Doesn’t Come

You will find it eventually, in a completely unrelated context, and it will turn out to be a B-side by a band you already own two albums by, and the moment will be strangely anticlimactic.

Or you’ll never find it and it’ll surface in your brain at random intervals for the next forty years.

Either way, the six notes win.