It's the unknown unknows that get you. Home appliance edition.

The wisest thing that Donald Rumsfield ever said (the only wise thing he ever said?) was:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

So, after twenty-two years, the refrigerator that Lis had before she and I started dating finally failed. It didn't even completely fail: it failed slowly enough to make sure that we knew it was failing, and continued to keep our food cold ENOUGH until we could get a new one. I'm proud of that fridge: ten years is a good run for a fridge, and fifteen is very good.

Our new fridge is a French-door bottom freezer, and I just finished putting all our food in it, and it is very nice, and I really like it.

And then I went to put all the things that we have on the outside of the fridge back on it.

It's not magnetic.

This is something that didn't even occur to me to think about. Refrigerator doors are ferromagnetic. That's just a thing about them. You stick things on refrigerators with magnets. It's just what you do.

It never even occurred to me to ponder otherwise.

It's the unknown unknowns that get you. I didn't know that I didn't know that magnets don't stick to the fridge door.