by Michael Pakaluk

It happens almost without fail that when I try to insert an old-style USB plug into a socket for it, I get it the wrong way. Moreover, when I say to myself, "I am probably inserting it the wrong way once again. Therefore, this time I will reverse what I intended to do," and then flip it, I invariably discover that I did have it the right way, and that in trying to correct myself I made it wrong again.

But how can this be? Can the universe really be so designed, that I am meant to encounter a contradiction every time I try to plug in an old-style USB? Is the contradiction so strongly woven into reality that - like the angel of death in the old tale - when you've thought you've avoided it, it has captured you, nonetheless?

I've often been tempted to write a column on this contradiction. In the past, I dismissed the idea, because it seemed silly. But then yesterday a friend wrote to complain, out of the blue and unprompted: "Every time I'm tempted to play Lotto I recall how often, when I plug a USB cord into one of those adapters, I plug it in wrong." Maybe it's not just me.

In any case, I want to say that there is a broad class of similar phenomena, where the world seems designed to annoy us with contradictions.

The word "annoyance" is itself telling. It comes from the word for hateful, "odious." Something an-oying, presents something hateful to us, an-odious. If the world is designed to be annoying, then it is designed to be hated - which seems profoundly correct from a Christian point of view. Surely a good God would design a world that pricks us with small hateful things. Hence the answer to the puzzle of why there are spiders, mosquitoes, cockroaches, gnats, and flies.

We try to minimize annoyances, yet we cannot remove them. Entire institutions are dedicated to removing them. We call them "resorts." Resorts can succeed in producing an annoyance-free life for a few days, perhaps (even if the USB problem perdures). But we know resorts are unreal. A wise traveler expects a resort to fail. He will take it in stride if he sees a dust bunny in a corner, or if the lobby coffee isn't hot, or the leaf blower in the morning is too loud.

In war, ordinary annoyances grow in size to become almost overwhelming, as if the world rises up in protest against the war - the mud, the rats, the maggots, the stench.

Mosquitoes are naturally occurring annoyances. But we bring them upon ourselves, if we leave around lots of standing water, so that they become part natural, part artificial.

Then there are annoyances which specifically bedevil our devices and machines. That these are a distinct class is shown by our invention of a distinct word for them, "gremlins" - a word which did not exist before the 1920s. Its popularity today is traceable back to its use by U.S. servicemen in World War II.

We cannot escape the effects of original sin with our machines. Gremlins will inevitably get into the best-designed and manufactured jeeps, tanks, and airplanes. Likewise, it is an unalterable rule that microphones will malfunction in public events. Perfectly good projectors fail more than they work. Phone buttons fail when they are most necessary. . . all because of gremlins.

Perhaps we should distinguish a "spoiling" from an annoyance. The rule that any material object that you love inordinately will be damaged the very first day that you own it is a rule of spoiling. The rule that you will need to fight feelings of regret and recrimination everyday thereafter is a rule of annoyance.

Annoyances seem gender-specific. Men are annoyed by such things as that it is impossible to pick up a collar stay. We lose at least one sock in every wash. The charcoal runs out only when we are confident that we have plenty. Plastic wrap inevitably splits and starts building up exponentially on a small portion of the roll. Hairs grow from the side of our ears at the rate of 2 inches per night.

These are annoying things, and they are transient. The annoyan...