Nicolas Bouliane

Things done properly

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Sakura pens are great, but they’re hard to tell apart from one another, especially in a stuffed pencil case at the bottom of a messenger bag. The pens have faint size markings, but some have worn off after a week.

I have marked mine with coloured tape on which I wrote their size.

Pens of different sizes

Now it’s easier to fish the right one out of my pencil case.

Pens in pencil case

I mostly use my plastic nib pen and my brush pen, so I made them a little different.

Colour-coded pens

I added an extra tape loop on the brush pen to help me find it by touch.

Pen marked with tape

These little fixes always felt normal to me. However my friends often hint at it being a very “me” thing to do.

It’s certainly a Bouliane thing to do. It is accepted that every Bouliane family visit starts with the patriarch’s tour of all the things he’s done properly.

As children, it was a quirk that we obliged in our elders, but then it happend to my father, and now it’s happening to me. There is not a single engineer among us, but the engineering spirit certainly flows through our veins.

With time, I have come to see the beauty in it. These little fixes are a way of investing in and exercising agency over one’s lived environment. The world is a wobbly table, and you have the power to slide a shim under its leg.

Other fixes

My have different shapes to help me distinguish them by touch.

Different-shaped keys

My cables are colour-coded: red for USB-C, yellow for micro USB, blue for lighting. I don’t really do it anymore, mostly because everything is USB-C now.

Colour-coded cables

It helps me find tiny, same-shaped adapters inside my luggage.

Colour-coded adapters

When I rewired my motorcycle, I marked the wiring I added in green, and wrapped one end of SAE cables in blue, to avoid accidentally plugging the wrong ends together. Blue is the side the power comes from.

Colour-coded SAE connectors

“[W]hen you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. […] Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.”

— Steve Jobs