The almost sharp scissors

The kitchen scissors that do not cut are gone within a week. They fail in front of you, and out they go.

The good pair, heavy and properly sharpened, makes every job shorter and is a small pleasure to hold. You notice that too, and you keep them for twenty years.

The pair I worry about is the one in the drawer of most homes in Jeddah. It cuts, mostly. It needs a second go at a chicken wing and a careful angle on a bag of frozen peas. It bruises herbs rather than slicing them. Nobody throws it out, because it works.

So the cook works around it. She buys meat already portioned, because doing it at home is a fight. She stops making the dish that needed the parsley chopped fine. She opens packets with a knife and nicks the counter. None of these feels like a decision. Each is a small adjustment to a tool that never quite failed.

A year later the cooking has changed shape, and the scissors did it. Not by breaking, but by charging a little extra effort on the jobs that did not matter, and nudging the jobs that did toward whatever was easiest.

The useless tool costs you a trip to the shop. The almost good one costs you what you meant to do, slowly, and never gives you a reason to look.