You step outside to reattach a plug to a cable that has been violently tugged loose by a passing ride-on mower, thinking, naively, that this is a five minute task. Strip wires. Tighten screws. Tea afterwards. Simple.
But no.
The original plug, before the mower performed its little act of agricultural sabotage, was at least honest about its age. It was flathead throughout. Case screw, terminal screws, the lot. A proper old plug. Probably made when men still wore ties to mend lawnmowers.
The trouble was that no single screwdriver could actually deal with it. The terminal screws needed one tiny flathead screwdriver, while the main clamshell screw required a much larger one. So even this supposedly simple old plug still demanded two entirely different screwdrivers, as though the designer feared the terrible consequences of standardisation.
Naturally, because every screw on Earth is now crosshead these days, every decent flat blade screwdriver in the house vanished sometime around 2014. What remained was one tiny electrician's screwdriver that could just about loosen the E, N and L terminal screws, but which merely bounced out of the large clamshell screw like a cocktail stick attempting heavy engineering.
So you rummaged through the drawer and found a replacement plug.
This one was worse, because it was modern enough to be awkward but not modern enough to be helpful. The clamshell screw was crosshead. The terminal screws were flathead. A hybrid design apparently created to ensure no single screwdriver could ever complete the job. One assumes there was concern about unemployment in the screwdriver sector.
The really depressing thing was that this wasn't even a genuinely modern plug. It was technically a "new" replacement plug bought sometime in the 1980s and then left unused in the drawer for forty years, quietly ageing alongside dead AAA batteries, curtain hooks, mystery fuses and keys to doors demolished during the Thatcher years.
Eventually you located the Lidl precision bit set. It unfolded like a surgical kit for robot neurosurgery. There were approximately 700 bits in there, covering every screw standard ever devised by mankind, including several apparently intended for Soviet submarines and Japanese cassette players from 1978.
Yet getting the bits out of the holder required more force than undoing the actual plug.
Then came the screw drop.
No human being has ever successfully fitted a 13A plug without dropping at least one screw into another dimension. The moment it leaves your fingers it achieves escape velocity and disappears into gravel, grass, floorboards or the quantum realm. You spend ten minutes crawling around muttering "it was just here" while holding the cable between your knees like an amateur bomb disposal technician.
All this because fitting a plug fundamentally requires three hands. One to hold the cable. One to hold the plug body. One to tighten the screw while simultaneously preventing the copper strands from exploding sideways like a burst wire brush.
Which raises the obvious question.
Why, in the name of all that is holy, has nobody invented a proper screwless 13A plug?
Well, they did.
Back in the 1980s there was a British-made thing called the TL screwless plug. Spring clamp terminals. Slide-off cover. Hand tightened cable grip. No screwdrivers required. It even had a little red locking disc you turned with a coin. Somebody briefly looked at the normal British plug fitting experience and concluded that crawling around patios searching for microscopic brass screws was perhaps not the apex of civilisation.
I'd never heard of them either.
Which is probably the whole problem with plugs. Once one is fitted, it disappears behind a sofa or under a desk for twenty years until somebody trips over the flex, drags it with a mower or vacuums it into oblivion. At which point nobody thinks, "I must seek out that advanced screwless marvel of British electrical engineering." You simply rummage through the drawer containing electrical artefacts from three governments ago and continue the national tradition of screwdriver based misery.
The really clever move would have been persuading appliance manufacturers to fit TL plugs as standard in the first place. Then millions of people would have quietly discovered that rewiring a plug no longer required the dexterity of a brain surgeon and a toolbox resembling RAF ground equipment.
But obviously nobody did that.
Presumably the TL plug added three pence to the manufacturing cost of a kettle, whereupon some procurement department declared the entire concept economically impossible and condemned future generations to crawling around patios looking for brass screws the size of fruit flies.
Then again, Britain has always had a talent for strangling good engineering ideas in exchange for immediate savings of roughly four pence.
So the screw terminal plug survived.
Partly because it genuinely is a brilliant design. The British 13A plug is probably the safest in the world. Solid pins. Proper earthing. Individually fused. Sensibly shuttered sockets. Somewhere buried beneath the irritation is a beautifully engineered device.
But also because Britain has a strange relationship with engineering progress. We will happily trust screwless Wago connectors hidden inside walls carrying mains current for decades, yet apparently cannot emotionally cope with a plug that doesn't require three screwdrivers and a nervous breakdown.
We built radar and Concorde, yet attaching three wires to a plug still resembles maintaining military communications during the retreat from Burma.
And, naturally, just as you've finally finished, you discover you've forgotten to put the cable grip on first and have to dismantle the whole bloody thing again.
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