The Drawer Audit: Sixty-One Items, One Verdict

The drawer has been the drawer since 2019. I have added to it continuously and removed from it never, which is the definition of the thing and also the reason it took an evening.

Sixty-one. Twenty-three cables, eleven power supplies, nine adapters, and eighteen items in a category I am calling objects, which includes four remotes for devices I no longer own and a bag of screws from a monitor arm.

The nine I would replace: two USB-C, one long HDMI, the good ethernet, the multimeter probes, a decent screwdriver set, the label maker, and two power supplies that are genuinely irreplaceable because the devices they belong to are still in daily use and both connectors are proprietary.

Which means fifty-two items were doing nothing except making the nine harder to find. That is the actual cost of a drawer like this. Not the space. The search.

A barrel connector at a voltage nobody uses, and a proprietary plug on a device from 2018 that is otherwise faultless and has no replacement part on sale anywhere.

Both machines will die when their power supply dies. Not when they break — they will not break, they are simple and well made. They will be thrown away because of a lead.

I have written a lot in this paper about subscriptions and about things that stop working when a server is turned off. This is the older, dumber version of the same thing, and it is entirely solved by a standard connector that has existed for years.

One was for a television that left this flat in 2021. That one went. I felt nothing.

The other three are for devices I cannot identify, and that is exactly why they are still there, because a remote for a known-dead device is rubbish and a remote for an unidentified device is a puzzle, and you cannot throw away a puzzle.

I have photographed all three. If anybody recognises a small grey one with a red power button and eleven keys, this paper would like to hear from you, and my drawer would like to hear from you rather more.

Eleven power supplies. Four were obvious. Three I identified by voltage and connector with some effort. Two I identified by plugging them in, carefully, having checked twice. Two are unidentified and are labelled UNKNOWN, which is itself useful information I did not have on Tuesday.

Twenty minutes. The drawer has existed in its unlabelled state for six years, which means I have spent considerably more than twenty minutes over those six years working out which one is the router's.

There is no clever conclusion here. It is a twenty-minute job with a six-year payback and I did not do it, and neither have you.

Not is it useful. Everything in a drawer like that is useful in principle and that question has kept every item in it for six years.

The question is: if I needed this on a Tuesday night, would I look in this drawer, or would I order one? For fifty-two of the sixty-one items the honest answer was that I would order one, because I would not trust the drawer to have it and I would not want to spend the twenty minutes finding out.

That is the test. Not value, not condition. Whether the thing is actually reachable at the moment you would want it — because a spare you would not go looking for is not a spare, it is just an object you are storing on behalf of a shop.