Where I live, the residential wall outlets are “duplex receptacles”(sidenote:1as the Home Depot website calls them)—the kind with one on the top and one on the bottom—placed close to the floor. A friend once chastised me and a second friend for habitually taking the top outlet, thereby obscuring the bottom free outlet from easy use for the next person.(sidenote:2Because, yknow. Close to the floor implies below arm level implies reaching down to plug things in implies a plug taking the top outlet obscures the bottom. If the outlets were above the arm level instead, a plug taking the bottom outlet obscures the top.) It’s then insult to injury that the top outlet is closer, because it’s something like selfishness to take the infinitesimally easier target instead of just plugging into the lower outlet to help out the next person.
This has vaguely lingered in my head since then, because something something morals and good form and social norms are things that I want to consider.
Some months later(sidenote:3Yes, I think months is accurate.), I realized one morning plugging in mine own laptop in mine own room that I was being put through a bit of annoying effort. Start-of-the-semester-Wade, seeing an empty duplex receptacle, decided to plug in the phone charger to the top outlet. I had been suffering the tiny annoyance for multiple multiple months, and only then consciously noticed it was even happening!
So there’s something interesting to be said about how the first friend noticed the annoyance of initial plug placement so easily, but it took me months to even realize the same thing was happening at all, even when I plug in my laptop multiple times a week, if not day. Something something people have different things going on in their heads.
“People have different thoughts, even if you are naturally biased into thinking everyone is and thinks like you” is a bias that keeps on popping up in my observations. So I suppose a moral of this story, and many others, is to avoid assuming the worst of people, perhaps in internet flame wars.
I don’t have finished thoughts on the morals of taking the top plug yet. In particular, I’m not sure if “it’s not that deep,” or rather, how deep these sorts of things are perceived or should be perceived.