The Cable Worked. First Time.

Six hundred rupees, no brand I recognised, bought from a shop with a hand-painted sign. I expected to be back there on Wednesday. It has now been four days and the thing works.

I want to be honest about my reaction, which was not gratitude. It was suspicion. I checked the charging speed twice. I checked whether it was doing data as well as power. It was doing both. I then spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time looking for the catch.

There is no catch. It is a cable. It has two ends and it moves electricity and information between them, which is what a cable has been able to do for a very long time.

The thing worth noticing is what a decade of buying accessories has done to my baseline. I have been trained to expect a working product to be a surprise, which means every company that ships one gets to feel like a hero for meeting the specification. That is a low bar that we built together, one bad cable at a time.

I tipped the drawer onto the bed on Sunday. Thirty-one cables and seven power bricks, and a plastic bag of the little rubber ties that come wrapped around new ones, which I have kept for no reason I can defend.

Nine I could name on sight. Another eleven I could work out by looking at the end. That leaves eleven that are, functionally, artefacts — objects from a technological culture I was personally present for and can no longer read.

Four of them go to devices I have not owned for years. I know this and I put them back in the drawer anyway, which I have thought about since and cannot explain except as a fear of the specific moment where you need a thing and remember throwing it out.

I threw out the eleven unidentifiable ones. I kept the four. I am aware that this is exactly backwards.

In the box: the cable, a tie, and a small card with a code on it and the words two year warranty.

The code opens a form. The form asks for the serial number, the date of purchase, the retailer name, and a photograph of the receipt. Four fields, three of which the manufacturer could have known already and one of which is printed on the card I am holding.

I did not register it. Neither will you. That is not a failure of the design; that is the design.

I gave it to my neighbour's son on Saturday. Wiped, charged, in the original box, which I had kept for five years for exactly this moment and had privately considered ridiculous the entire time.

He set it up in about ten minutes and it is fast. Genuinely fast. It is fast because it is now running eleven applications instead of ninety-four, and because five years of things I installed once are not on it.

So the phone was never slow. My use of it was slow, and every year the fix presented to me was a new phone, and every year I got a bit closer to believing it.

I am not going to pretend I would have kept it. I would not have. But I would like to record that the device I described to three separate people as unusable is currently the best phone in that flat.