Plugspin

Plugspin (n.) is the three-part ceremony performed whenever a flat, rectangular plug meets its socket. First attempt: it will not go in. You turn it over. Second attempt: it will not go in, with more conviction. You turn it back. Third attempt, in exactly the position you started with: it slides home as smoothly as a key into a lock, as if nothing unusual had happened, and the plug refuses to comment.

Most people have performed plugspin thousands of times, usually behind a desk, by feel, at an angle, with one cheek pressed against the wall. It is often done in the dark, where the socket is a vague rectangle and the plug is a guess. The lighting never helps. Neither does the fact that the socket always seems to be on the back of the machine, facing the only direction you cannot see.

There are recognised styles. The patient plugspin, three calm turns and no remarks. The squinting plugspin, in which the owner holds the plug up to the light, studies the little metal tongue inside it like a jeweller, decides with total certainty which way it goes, and is wrong. And the defeated plugspin, which ends with the owner handing the cable to the nearest teenager, who does it first time without looking up from something else.

Plugspin has a close relative in the stairwell of every block of flats: the keyspin, in which you try each key on the ring in turn, and the right one is always the last. The two share a feeling. Somebody, you suspect, arranged this.

There is also a folk explanation, popular in offices, which holds that the plug exists in both orientations at once until observed, and only settles into the right one on the third try. It is a joke. It is also, according to several people who have spent a long afternoon under a desk, the only theory that fits the evidence.

The real story is simpler and a little kinder. A plug that only fits one way up has a fifty-fifty chance of being right on the first go, so half of all attempts are wrong from the start by pure chance. And very often the first attempt was the right way up all along, just a millimetre off-centre or not pushed quite straight. Turning it over and back gives your hand a second, better-aimed go, and the success gets credited to the flip.

Memory does the rest. A plug that goes in first time is instantly forgotten, while one that fights back becomes a small story you remember, so it feels as though plugs are always difficult. Engineers noticed the grumbling too: the newer oval connector that many phones and laptops now use, known as USB-C, was designed to fit either way up, which is why plugspin is slowly becoming a thing people only remember fondly. Like most rituals, it will be missed by nobody and mentioned by everybody.