The Warranty You Forgot You Had

It has a particular, familiar sting: something breaks, you go looking for the receipt or the box it came in, and somewhere in that search you half-remember there was a warranty — two years, maybe three — and a slow, sinking calculation begins about whether you're still inside that window or not. Sometimes you are, and the relief is real. Often you're not, by a matter of months, and the appliance that would have been replaced for free becomes one you're paying to fix or replace yourself.

The warranty was never the problem. Not knowing when it ended was.

Nobody forgets a warranty exists on purpose. It's simply that a warranty is a piece of information that matters intensely for about five minutes — the day it expires, if only you'd known — and is otherwise completely irrelevant for months or years at a stretch. That's a strange kind of thing to expect memory to hold onto: not "remember this," but "remember this on one specific day, out of hundreds, without anything prompting you to."

That's not a memory problem. It's an information-design problem, and it's the same shape as the "second memory" idea running through everything else here: you don't need a system that asks you to remember harder. You need somewhere that knows, so the one day it actually matters isn't the day you find out too late.

Just enough tracking, not a filing system

This doesn't call for a spreadsheet of every purchase you've ever made. Lagom's answer, as usual, sits in the middle: not "track nothing and hope," and not "digitise every receipt the day you buy anything." Just the handful of things genuinely worth a moment's note — the big-ticket items, the ones expensive enough that missing the window would actually sting. A washing machine. A boiler. Not the toaster.

For those few, worth actually knowing when the window closes matters — not so you can obsess over it, but so the warranty gets to do the one job it was always meant to do, instead of quietly expiring somewhere you weren't looking.