hair and other traces

why are people disgusted when they find a hair in their food? is it actually germs they fear, or the body of the cook? today i found a hair in the box of a prefab ikea drawer unit. i don’t want to eat the unit. but who made all these uniform pieces? what happens to bodies paid to enact the movements of machines? or to repetitively operate machines, and have to move in accordance with the idiosyncracies of the machine? the individuality of the third world worker is constantly erased so that we can have uniform goods. there’s a benjamin article about this somewhere.

my friend louise, who lives in england, has the same shelf as one i just bought last week. neal stephenson’s burbclaves are real.

who counted all the screws and bolts in the plastic bag that came in my prefab package? they left a trace– “60” or “09”. was it satisfying to know that there was exactly the right number of each kind of wooden peg?