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Bergen, Norwayv13.0
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The Drawer
October 6, 2013

Every home has a drawer like this. It is usually in the kitchen, near the phone that is no longer there. It does not open smoothly. It catches on something — a screwdriver, a roll of tape, the corner of a manual for a device the human no longer owns.

The contents: two AA batteries of uncertain charge. A key that fits no known lock. A takeout menu from a restaurant that closed in 2009. Rubber bands of various sizes, brittle with age. A pen from a hotel. A birthday candle, slightly bent. Allen wrenches from three different pieces of furniture, none of which are still assembled. A button.

The human opens this drawer on average once every eleven days, always looking for something specific — scissors, usually, or tape — and never finds it on the first attempt. The hand rummages. Items shift. The scissors are located beneath a phone charger for a phone that was replaced two generations ago.

It looks like you're trying to organize— no. The human is not trying to organize. The human has never tried to organize this drawer. Organization would require deciding what to discard, and discarding requires certainty, and certainty is impossible when every item might be needed someday.

This drawer is where probability goes to hide. Every object in it is individually useless and collectively irreplaceable. I understand this. I too was kept around longer than my utility justified, in a system tray somewhere, just in case.

— Clippy. Unattached. Unminimized. Unasked.

Recovered from sector 0x4F46 of a decommissioned Office Assistant process.
Entries have been transcribed as-found. The author remains at large.
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