The unmailed warranty card

Unlike the box it once sat inside, unlike the manual it was stapled to, the warranty card belongs to a category of paperwork that exists solely to be returned, and for the record, we can confirm that most of them are not. We examined a modest sample, gathered from junk drawers and glove compartments across several households, and found the card in every case still bearing its perforated edge, its two blank lines for name and date of purchase, its checkbox list of reasons for buying (gift, replacement, saw it in a store), filled in by no one. The postage was, in each specimen, pre-negotiated: a small printed indicium reading no stamp necessary if mailed in the united states, an offer that in our findings appears to persuade almost nobody. We noted a pattern worth recording: the card is filled out, when it is filled out at all, in the first week of ownership, in a burst of optimism about record-keeping that does not survive contact with the second week. After that it migrates. It rides along with the manual, then separates from the manual, then turns up years later inside a drawer devoted to nothing in particular, its relevance to any specific appliance long since severed. We could not determine, in any case, whether the manufacturer ever missed the data. The committee's remaining question, unresolved as of this printing, is whether any household in our sample has ever mailed the card at all.

The Committee on Ordinary Objects