The demagnetized hotel key card

Held to the lock's black eye, the card behaves as if it has never failed anyone. The green light answers. The latch gives its small mechanical concession. Then, by the third or fourth day of a stay, the same card is presented and the door does not open, and no one nearby can say why: not the phone in the same pocket, not the coincidental proximity to a hotel branded pen, not the two nights spent folded into a wallet next to a credit card of unrelated magnetic ambition. Front desks keep a drawer of blank replacements for exactly this, encoded in seconds and handed over with the mild apology of people who have stopped being surprised. The card itself gives no diagnostic. It does not flicker before it dies. It simply, one afternoon, becomes a rectangle of plastic with a room number written on it in pencil, useful only as a bookmark or a paint scraper or a thing found later in a coat pocket, evidence of a trip whose dates have already blurred. Housekeeping carts hold stacks of the dead ones, sorted by nothing. A card that has stopped working looks identical to one that hasn't. This is either a design failure or the entire point, and the drawer keeps filling regardless of which.

H. G. Plimsoll