USB is the only macroscopic fermion I know. Try to plug it in and fail, rotate it 180˚ and fail, rotate 180˚ and it plugs in. Must be the minus sign.

The funniest part is that it still takes 3 tries even when you know what you just said.

hehe, right on

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

It sounds like we'd be better off not knowing about this law. Thanks.

I had a variant of that for covid. The contagion curve plotted daily rates even taking into account people knowing about the contagion curve.

I've found a trick but have trouble explaining it to people - especially if they haven't build a computer before.

The plastic bit inside of the plug usually goes on the side facing whatever board it's interfacing with.

For example, looking straight on from the back of an ATX case, it's usually on the left side - where the motherboard mounts

Front panel connectors are anarchy... but at least they're usually visible

Another trick is that the USB standard says the USB logo should be facing up, so you should always try it first with the logo facing up. Not every device follows that standard and not every device has a clear top/bottom, but this really cuts down on the proportion of failed attempts.

No way! I didn't know that was part of the standard! Very useful "trick" indeed, unless of course, the USB port is placed vertically...

The pattern on the aluminum of the plug is also helpful in cases of predictable slot orientation (like a laptop, except a Dell Latitude from back in the day that had upright connectors on the back unless I'm misremembering). The side without the seam down the middle and instead a tiny rectangular cutout center but slightly lower than the other two cutouts, should face up. In the dark, the seam can be felt by lightly scraping with a fingernail.

The holes face up, like the eyes of a sole or flatfish.

One trick used to be the UBB trident logo (embossed into the cable) always faced upward when plugged into a USB port on a computer.

Sideways ports may be a crap shoot I'm not sure if their orientation is standardized. And I'm not sure about modern USB version if that's still the case of logo faces up.

This gets you down from 3 tries to 2

lol ty, this got me

If the standard included specs on the enclosure, then maybe we wouldn't need three tries. Especially when plugging these in blind, like the back of a monitor, I wish the case had a funnel shaped shroud so you know the male end was aligned correctly even though it might be reversed.

Even after 25 years of using USB devices this still happens to me, today, in fact!