Tiny Screws are Ruining my Life!

This week, I had to fix some equipment. It wasn’t a big fix; a lever had fallen out of alignment with its little sensor and needed to be moved 2 mm back in place so the software would stop claiming that the lever had vanished from the face of the earth. This fix took me around 4 hours, divided up into: opening the box (3 minutes), moving the sensor (30 seconds), watching one of the screws fall onto the floor (5 seconds), scrabbling around trying to find the stupid screw (3 hours, 56 minutes and 35 seconds… ish). No time is included for putting the panel back on because the screw remains missing, and the sensor is now operating ‘alfresco’.

Given this, I think it’s fair to say that I suspect that tiny screws are ruining my life.

Now, I hope you understand that I do appreciate tiny screws. They are invaluable little things that are very well-designed at screwing two things together. As technology has grown more compact and smaller, screw technology has, obviously, worked hard to keep up, and screws have got smaller and more compact to match. I’m sure as you read this within arm’s reach, you can see five different devices that are only possible because of the tiny screws. But with great smallness comes great ability to get lost, and with what I suspect is malicious intent, they do.

They are so tiny that no amount of careful placement on the table can save them. All it takes is a jumper sleeve, a light breeze, or a slightly overcharged static surface nearby and off the table, and they jump into something akin to the screw equivalent of the backrooms. Of course, losing tiny screws is only the first problem. The next is caused by actually finding them.

It’s pretty rare that you find the screw at the same time you drop it. Generally, the screw that goes missing is found some weeks later, long after you’ve forgotten what it goes with. But it’s not uncommon that for every screw you search for, you find 2-3 previously lost screws. This appears to break the laws of conservation, but tiny screws don’t concern themselves with such silly things.

Having spent so much time searching for screws, you know how important any found screws might be, even if they might be the ones you are looking for. And so into a drawer of other assorted tiny screws which you are keeping ‘just in case,’ these re-found screws go and slowly build up a giant collection of tiny screws. None of the tiny screws will ever work as a replacement for your newly lost tiny screw, and they are inexplicably unique to whatever they were holding together.

This is now where I find myself. In a world where tiny screws are missing from equipment all around me, and owning an ever-growing and inexplicable large box of tiny screws that fit no equipment I’ve ever owned. I fear that I am now doomed to spend hours searching for even more tiny screws and constantly simultaneously searching for ever bigger boxes to put the tiny screws I have. 

While writing this article, I realised a small screw is missing from the bottom of my Macbook… if you have a 0.8 mm screw with a star-shaped head in your personal giant box of tiny screws, please do get in touch. Maybe together we can beat them.