# The four-letter system that finds a battery by feel

> A drawer split into four wooden lanes, labelled AA, AAA, C and D — sorted by size alone, so the right battery gets found without reading anything.

August 22, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-drawer-of-batteries-sorted-by-size

An open drawer, printed flat across the chest in black and amber. Four wooden dividers split it
into four lanes. A small card sits at the head of each one, reading AA, AAA, C, D — one card per
lane, left to right. Each lane holds batteries of exactly the size its card names, lying on their
side in a row.

Nobody re-sorts this drawer. It never needs it. Everything already has a lane.

## Why sort a battery drawer by size instead of by brand or by charge?

Because size is the one thing about a battery that's fixed and impossible to get wrong, and
brand and charge are neither.

A battery's size never changes and never has to be checked — it's built into the object. Sorting
by brand groups things that behave identically anyway; sorting by charge would require testing
every battery on a schedule nobody keeps. Size sorts once and stays sorted, which is the entire
reason a system like this survives years without being redone.

## What makes a lane system like this actually work, day to day?

That the label matches something you can find without reading it — the width of the lane itself.

The AA lane is narrower than the D lane before you've read either card. In a dim room, at a
rushed moment, a hand can find the right lane by feel and only glance at the card to confirm it.
That's a close cousin of [a shed's tool silhouettes showing a gap from the doorway before anyone's
counted anything](/stories/the-shed-is-a-filing-system) — the system is doing work before
anyone consciously reads it.

## Do I need permission to print a system like this on a shirt?

No — a drawer, four dividers and four handwritten cards reading AA, AAA, C and D describe a way
of organising, not a design anyone owns. There's no brand's product here, only the standard size
names that already belong to no one.

### Where a licence would actually apply

Only if the artwork copied a specific manufacturer's own battery packaging or printed branding —
that belongs to them. An invented drawer with plain hand-lettered cards, like this one, needs
nobody's sign-off. Style has no owner. A work does.

## Does this size-first sorting logic apply to anything besides batteries?

Screws, fuses, nails, anything that comes in a small range of fixed physical sizes takes the same
lane system for the same reason — sort by the dimension that never changes and the sorting never
goes stale. It's a different discipline from [a freezer bag's shorthand, which is sorted by
date rather than
size](/stories/the-freezer-is-labelled-in-code) — there, the thing that matters is what
you can't see at a glance; here, it's what you can.

## Isn't a whole drawer with dividers overkill for something you could just keep in a bag?

A bag holds batteries; it doesn't answer "which size, right now, without tipping it out." The
dividers are the entire difference between storage and a system you can use without looking twice.
Once the lanes exist, keeping them sorted costs nothing — a battery only ever goes back into the
lane it came from.

## Does it print well?

Yes — the drawer's straight dividers and the flat handwritten cards are hard-edged shapes that
hold up cleanly at fabric scale in two inks.

Black carries the drawer's structure and the battery outlines; amber sits inside just the label
cards and the battery ends, so the eye lands on the four words first. Keep the card lettering
blocky rather than fine-lined — thin serifs on AAA in particular are the first thing to fill in on
cloth.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the drawer at [JustOG](/) — how many lanes, what's written on the cards, which sizes get
kept. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made
to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Four lanes, four cards, and a hand that already knows which one it wants before it looks.