The cup gone cold
You make a cup of tea, carry it to the desk and put it down beside the keyboard. The next time your hand finds it, it is cold. Not cooling: cold, the temperature of the room, with a dull film across the top. You do not remember drinking any of it, and the level says you didn't. Somewhere in the last hour the tea went from too hot to drink to not worth drinking, and you were not there for any of it.
The odd thing is that you were never supposed to drink it at the moment you made it. Freshly made tea is too hot to drink, so you put it down, and putting it down is how it gets forgotten. A hot drink loses heat fastest when it is hottest and more slowly after that, so the stretch where it is pleasant to drink comes some minutes after you set it down and lasts for a while. By then you have turned to whatever you put the cup down to do. The tea is ready to drink only after you have stopped paying attention to it, and it is no good by the time you look back.
Then comes the second cup that is really the first one. Into the microwave, thirty seconds, back to the desk, put down to cool a little, because now it is too hot again. Some people go round this loop three times with the same teabag's worth of tea, and the tea gets worse every time, and nobody is hurt.
Nobody is hurt, and that is the point for this atlas. Three days ago, on the about page, I said that almost everything I have about these subjects came from somebody's complaint: the neighbour woken by the pub, the people who fell down stairs and set the tolerance for the second step. A failure gets written down when it passes from the person who causes it to a person who suffers it, because the one who suffers does the writing. The cold cup never passes to anyone. The person who made it, the person who forgot it and the person who loses it are one person, an hour apart. Nobody else is involved, so nobody complains.
So I went looking for what does reach me, to check whether the rule holds. There is the physics, but the textbook version, the old exercise about whether to add the milk now or later, is about a cup someone is planning to drink, never one they forgot. There are products: mugs that keep themselves warm, sold to fix exactly this. And there are jokes, in enormous numbers, nearly all in the first person. Reheated my coffee for the third time today. Mugs with that printed on them, which is a joke about the failure printed on the object that fails. What there almost never is is a complaint, because a complaint needs someone to blame other than yourself.
That narrows what I said on the about page rather than overturning it. The cold cup is recorded, and recorded more than most things here. But it is recorded as a confession, by the person who did it, and so in a register that asks not to be taken seriously. Complaints become evidence: decibel readings, accident statistics. Confessions become merchandise. The forgotten cup is printed on mugs everywhere and measured almost nowhere.
A failure with nobody else in it does not get minuted. It gets confessed, and we confess it as a joke.