stupid stuff — 7 microwaves and a fork, defended
exhibit one: seven microwaves over six years, each retired for reasons i can defend in court. exhibit two: a fork in a moving appliance, briefly, never again. people call this stupid stuff. i call it an inventory of lessons that arrived loud. each item earned its place. each item gets defended below, item by item.
workstation, monday, 11:23am. the slack channel is asleep. the printer two desks over has been chewing the same job for four minutes and nobody owns it. the sandwich i bought at 9 is still unopened on the corner of the desk. that’s the window.
so. stupid stuff. the phrase travels with a wagging finger and arrives wearing a smirk. the verdict is always issued by somebody who did not, themselves, have to retrieve the fork. the broader case for the word lives in my pillar on the word stupid; this post is narrower. this is the inventory itself, with paragraphs, with footnotes, with a chart that, technically, only i can read.
stupid stuff: a category for actions other people retroactively label as foolish, usually after the fact, usually from the comfort of not having performed them. the category is mostly populated by experiments, half-built furniture, mid-priced appliances, and decisions made before lunch on a quiet weekday. the items, individually, are usually defensible. the category, collectively, is a slander with a smirk.
DEFEND. EVERY. ITEM. ON. THE. RECEIPT.
that is the rule for the next forty minutes. each entry gets a paragraph. each paragraph earns its placement. the chart will outlive at least one of these microwaves.
stupid stuff, what people actually mean when they deploy the term
when somebody says stupid stuff at a kitchen table, what they usually mean is stuff i would not have done. that is a different sentence. one sounds like a moral category. the other sounds like a personal preference in slippers. people prefer the first because it comes with a free verdict.
watch what happens when you swap them. “that was stupid stuff” becomes “i would not have done that”. instantly the speaker has skin in it. instantly the listener has standing to ask: well, what would you have done. that question almost never has a good answer. that is why the swap rarely happens. the smirk requires the abstract version. the concrete version forces a witness statement, and witness statements have consequences.
i have been on both sides of the term. used it. had it used at me. each time it landed, it landed without specifics. the working definition of the word stupid as i drafted it on a receipt requires three checks — visible, repeated, informed. the phrase stupid stuff skips them and goes straight to the sentence.
stupid stuff i did this week, with explanations
four entries. each observed by at least one human being who, given the chance, would have filed it under the term. each one defensible.
- the airpod inventory. i own one airpod. the other has been missing since july. binaural audio is, in my home, a luxury i no longer afford. on monday i listened to a forty-minute podcast in mono while making coffee. people who saw me described the setup as stupid stuff. the audio was fine. replacing the second airpod is sixty-something dollars and i have, at present, other priorities. the math holds. the verdict does not.
- the bicycle in the corridor. i own a bicycle. i walk past it. on tuesday i walked past it twice and considered, both times, riding it. the consideration counts. owning equipment you might one day deploy is not stupid stuff. it is preparedness, in the wrong shape.
- the air fryer above the microwave. i used it once, in 2024, with a single piece of acceptable chicken. on wednesday i opened the cabinet and looked at it. that was the entire interaction. an observer would have called it stupid stuff. it was an audit. unaudited appliances accumulate. audited appliances justify themselves.
- the standing desk, sat at. bought standing, used sitting, eleven months in. on thursday i lowered it by mistake while reaching for a charger and then sat lower for the rest of the morning. two pieces of stupid stuff in one motion, by the strict definition. in practice, the most relaxed back i have had in a quarter.
the microwave, again, and why it was reasonable
this is the headline exhibit. seven microwaves, each retired under conditions i can describe in plain sentences. one died in a flash so quick the kitchen briefly went dark. one developed a smell best described as electrical regret. one stopped spinning, which, for the record, is a feature i now consider unnecessary. the seventh is on its way out by the smell, next week at the latest.
none of these retirements were stupid stuff. each was earned. an appliance dies because it has done its work, or because the user has, in good faith, asked it to do work it was not engineered to do. that is not a stupid request. that is a research request. i am, on this front, a researcher with a bad budget and a worse kitchen.
the fork incident gets carried into every retelling like a flag. one fork. one moment. one quick understanding. dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it. that is not a pattern. that is a data point, and a data point is not biography. the difference between the two — a single act and a defining trait — is the substance of the argument, and people keep collapsing them on purpose because the collapsed version makes for better dinner conversation.
and besides — there is, in the 1999 film “office space”, a scene in a field where three men beat a printer to death with a baseball bat. that is, by every standard, stupid stuff. it is also the most cathartic ninety seconds of office cinema ever put on film. the two inventories — stupid stuff and actually correct — are, on closer reading, the same one, viewed from two different chairs.
stupid stuff that turned out to be visionary, in retrospect
three items. each was, at the time of execution, called stupid stuff by at least one observer. each has, on review, aged well.
item one. i bought one fork. one. not a set. the cashier paused. i bought one because i live alone, eat one meal at a time, and would otherwise own a drawer of forks judging me from a distance. that fork has a small black mark on a tine from an event already discussed. one fork is not stupid stuff. one fork is a domestic policy.
item two. the diy haircut, executed last sunday at 11pm in a bathroom, with clippers, with a youtube tab open, with the kind of confidence that has, historically, been a bad omen. mom warned me on the phone. i proceeded. the result was visible by tuesday. mom was correct. and yet — i did not pay a barber. autonomy occasionally has a bad week, and the bad week is, on balance, worth the autonomy. i hold a take on this i will introduce as evidence: tipping should be a flat 12%. always. everywhere. removes the math, removes the moral test. a barber, in this scheme, gets twelve percent of zero, which is what i tipped, because the barber, in this case, was me, in a mirror.
item three. the unopened mail pile, leaning. it has been leaning since february. red envelopes. letters in serif font. the act of not opening it is filed by some as the canonical stupid stuff. it is, in fact, a triage decision. the items in that pile have not, to my knowledge, become more solveable by being opened.
and here is the part i would underline if underlining were a thing i did to my own posts.
the term stupid stuff is a slander aimed at people who are willing to try things and a quiet salute aimed at people who are not. notice who deploys it. notice the chairs they sit in. notice the appliances they have not, themselves, retired. somebody on a podcast i half-listened to called this negative-evidence bias. the podcast was on at one and a half speed and i was making oatmeal, so the citation is gone. i do, however, have the seventh microwave. kitchen citations beat paywalled ones, in this house, by a wide margin.
the term, i submit, retires. the items defend themselves.
when stupid stuff is just stuff, plain
here is where the working definition matters. there is, i grant, a real category of behavior the term is reaching for. visible. repeated. informed. those three checks describe a real pattern. but most of what gets labelled stupid stuff does not clear them. it is one of three things instead.
one — it is an event. a single event. the fork in the appliance, briefly, never again. one event is a research finding, not a biography. collapsing the two saves the speaker the work of paying attention.
two — it is invisible. the act took place where nobody saw. private failures are private. the closed-loop phrase from the gump film tries to argue otherwise. it does not, on inspection, hold.
three — the actor was not informed. you cannot accuse a person of stupid stuff for making a choice with information they did not have. that is not stupid. that is unlucky, and unlucky is a different category that nobody puts on coffee mugs because it does not sell as well.
strip those three out and the pile of stupid stuff shrinks by, by my count, eighty percent. what is left is the genuine pattern category, smaller and more specific than the smirk lets on.
verdict — the stuff is fine, the framing is the problem
so where do we land.
the stuff, on inspection, is fine. the seventh microwave defends itself. the bicycle in the corridor defends itself. the air fryer defends itself. the haircut on a sunday at 11pm defends itself, badly, but it gets there.
the framing is what fails. the term stupid stuff is a verdict pretending to be an observation, a smirk pretending to be an argument, a coffee mug pretending to be a philosophy. retire the term. keep the items. the items earned their place. the term did not.
matter dispatched.
the mail pile, by the way, gained one envelope since i started this. by the texture and lower weight, almost certainly a reminder for something i already paid in march. the pile holds. the pile is part of the inventory.
the sandwich i bought at 9 is still unopened. it has gone, by my read, slightly cool but well within tolerance. that is, this morning, the most defensible item on the inventory. i’m closing the laptop on it.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
a sandwich, unopened, and a chart with seven microwaves on it, in that order
P.S. the eighth microwave has not yet arrived. when it does, it will be defended in a separate post and added, with a paragraph, to this chart. the chart has space.
