Have you ever found yourself propping up a smartphone against a dashboard or car radio or cigarette lighter or whatever, so you could use it for the GPS directions? And suffered the pain of hitting the brake or making a turn and seeing the phone go tumbling around the cabin?
The standard solution is a cumbersome and unsightly suction cup stand like this:
Unsightliness aside, it's an over-engineered solution. It's overkill - and looks like it! You just need some stickiness where it counts.
The aforementioned tape is like flattened soft silicon gel with tacky top and bottom. Adhere one side to any sort of horizontal surface, e.g. the skinny plastic ledge beneath the speedometer. And set your phone down upon it, for some modest grab on your phone.
Is it perfect support? It is not. The phone, lightly stuck just on the bottom, might still tumble over. Just not nearly as easily. It's like 90% better, and you don't have to live with a stupid plastic extensor arm suction-cupped to your windshield.
The tape is admirably reusable. If you pull it up, it won't leave residue. I always bring a little roll with me when I rent a car, and have used this in every car I've ever driven (that doesn't have CarPlay), replacing it every six months or so as it loses tackiness.
Ok, so I know how this lands on contemporary ears. Good-enough quasi-solutions seem shoddy; fumbling; weak. They might even elicit class prejudice. "I'm not someone who puts cheap tape on my dashboard to hold up my phone. I'm not that person. I do things nicely. I do things properly."
There was a time when only aristocrats expected their domain to be uniformly Nice and Elegant and Solid. Then this became a bourgeois expectation. Nowadays, it's everybody. I recently tried to give old clothing to an unemployed friend, who looked at me like I'd offered a wad of snotty tissues. Just because he incessantly complains about his oppressive poverty doesn't mean he's some hobo! He's a nice person (implication: poor people aren't nice people) experiencing temporary setbacks, that's all!
A "good-enough" solution wreaks of lower class. Mrs. Howell does not seek workarounds. Mrs. Howell tears out the wall, or the whole darned building, if necessary, to ensure it's right! She's a nice person with nice things who does things nicely! And Jim's stupid tape idea is NOT NICE. NOKD!
The young couple who bought my house want to add HVAC (central air) first thing, to evade the shabby tyranny of wall unit air conditioners (the house came with a slew of them).
I told them that HVAC is indisputably great if you can afford it. Totally smart move! But why not live in the house for a year, and suffer a bit from the inadequacy of imperfect comfort? That way, when you finally install the HVAC, you'll be relieving something. It will feel like an upgrade!
And, by waiting, they might discover that the wall units work well enough. No one has ever stood in a house where HVAC replaced decent and plentiful wall units and said, "My God, that's so much better!" Despite the lofty price tag, it's just not that sort of life improvement. So why not experience the baseline first?
They listened patiently, but I could hear their thoughts. Dude. Well-intentioned shabby old dude. We're getting central air. We are not farm animals.
Being aristocrats, we've lost all touch with the notion of "good enough". The phrase evokes poverty. Grubby. Not-nice. Like someone offering you their shabby sweatshirts.
Indeed, I can read the above while visualizing myself as a stubborn old coot futzing around with plastic tape to mock up his stupid smartphone, which still falls over a bunch of times. Jesus Christ! Then setting his calendar to remind him to REPLACE THE TAPE every six months. So grubby! So suboptimal! So poor!
I didn’t change. Everything else did.
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