Thank you, everyone, for listening in.

I’m beginning to think that there may not in fact be any limitations to the usefulness of duct tape. It must be one of the best products made that goes way, way beyond its original purpose. I mean, it’s there in the term itself: duct tape. If everything had ended up simply as it was narrow-mindedly intended, the only people who would know about its awesome beauty and power would be HVAC technicians. You know, guys who at some point end up with a duct on their left and another one on their right, and need some effective way to join them together. Otherwise, your heat and your air conditioning end up just staying in the loft and you don’t feel anything coming through the vents in your actual house.

It’s a joy to use, too. Well designed. Yes, this is on the level of what we might call the smaller pleasures in life, but when you pick up the roll of it that you keep in your toolkit or wherever, you know that every stage of taping two things together using it is going to be a goddamn masterpiece.

The first thing is that you can see the end of the roll from when you last tore off a piece, unlike you can with Scotch Tape, if one of the great human tragedies happens and the Scotch tape gets loose from its proper perch in the plastic dispenser. You roll the disc  of Scotch tape around and around. Nothing to be seen. You get a fingernail in and trace it slowly around the circle, like you’re working with nitroglycerin. Often still nothing, until you reason with yourself and decide that it has to have an end somewhere. It’s not like the universe.

And then a sigh of relief when you find it. But this is when the real torture begins, when the CIA agents say, Fuck the waterboarding, we’re going straight to the electric prods. I would say, generously, that there is one time in a thousand that I can get the full width of that Scotch tape pulled back up and onto its spot on the dispenser. The other 999 times I have to pick at it until I break a fingernail, or, even worse, hey, it starts to come off, but not the full width. I pull on it and it starts small, then gets a little wider, but never gets to full width. I have to set it aside and accept that someone is not going to be getting their parcel in the mail before their birthday. Duct tape is a gentleman, a lady, a scholar. You pick gently at one corner, the full width unfurls, and, listen to this, 3M, makers of Scotch Tape—when you tear off the amount you want it makes a perfect line. You have what we had thought for centuries was impossible in this derelict corner of the universe that we ended up in: a strong piece of tape, easily gotten, and strong enough to hold together even some of the more pesky atoms of this universe.

I want to see it used in medicine, in surgery. The surgeon and the nurses and the rest are all gathered around the table where the cut has been made, the surgeon has removed the bad bit from his body, and now they have to stitch him up without the surgeon leaving his car keys in there like last time. But, no, wait! Duct tape! The nurse is so used to giving him the needle and surgical thread that she’s got it all ready when he says, wait for it, “Duct tape.”

“I’m sorry, doctor, what? What did you say?”

“Duct tape. I use it all the time at home.”

“I thought that’s what you said, but—”

“We have to think outside the box,” the surgeon says.

And the nurse reminds him that it’s not a box but a 66-year-old man who’s just had a kidney removed.

The surgeon gives her a look. Her eyebrows go up but she can’t talk back because he’s kind of her boss.

“Duct tape,” he says again, and some assistant from the side goes out to a supply closet and in about a minute runs back in all out of breath, holding up the grey duct tape like he’s just won a medal at the Olympics.

“OK,” the surgeon says, “two people push the skin from the left and two from the right and when they touch I’ll tape it up.”

So the moral of the story is that even though the patient was back a week later with an infection from the adhesive, and a hole in his belly that still wasn’t healed, professionals like surgeons have to take a chance some time, even though it might mean they get stripped of their ability to practice medicine and his co-workers at Tim Hortons now call him Doctor Duck.