Where have all the Fujis gone?

Hey, you Einsteins out there: how come the greater the quantity of the something you have, the faster it disappears? There’s gotta be a formula or equation or law to explain this perverse effect of consumer physics.

Like, you’re looking for a pen, and can’t find one, so you go “Screw this, I’m buying a whole bag of pens so I never have to search for one again.” You wheel home the biggest sack of pens the combined forces of Bic and Costco can produce. “I’ve used, like, the same two pens for the last six months,” you figure. “At that rate, this many pens should last decades!” You’ve got it made now, brother. Now when you need a pen, do you go digging through every drawer in the house? Like hell you do. You just grab a fresh one out of the bag like a pen boss. Then, one day you reach for a pen and find… there are only two left! Your carefree carnival of wanton inkpen abuse is suffocated by the empty cellophane bag of reality. You keep a neurotic eye on those last two pens for another six months or so until you can’t take the anxiety any more and start the whole cycle all over again.

So it goes with batteries. When you only have a few batteries in reserve, it’s amazing how long you can make them last, how quickly you learn to do without: “No, this remote’s fine, you just have to hit the buttons a few times for it to register.” But when you’ve stocked up on 48-packs of AA or AAA batteries, you’re Henry the 8th, you are, you are: batteries are condemned at the first sign of disloyalty, tossed aside for younger, more responsive replacements. Until suddenly you run out of new candidates for the guillotine.

It’s the same flaw in human nature that wiped out the passenger pigeon, and the dodo, and the once-lush forests of Lebanon and Haiti. “Look at all these things, we’ll never use them all” is followed inevitably by “Oh shit, we used them all.” If you want a brief, shining moment of blithe and untroubled battery usage, buy some of these Fuji megapacks and prepare for the inevitable hangover of regret. If you want to really make batteries last, though, you should buy fewer of them. Maybe Stephen Hawking can explain it.