The Baboon Congress

Wireless is More

41 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

So we got moved into the apartment across the way—clock, socks, and peril. And look at the mess that resulted.

Oh, what a tangled web …
… we weave.

It’s not my fault. All those wires are the result of everything being wireless now. I call it my wirelessness-mess. How does wirelessness require all these wires?

Reminds me of when our company tried to go paperless. Or when the State of Minnesota started requiring payment in electronic funds transfer. Oh, the paper it consumed setting up that process and tracking it in our files–paper files, of course. (Does the State track it in paper at their end, too?) Part of the paperless failure was mine. I simply cannot edit on screen. But the wirelessness-mess is not my fault.

It started with the phones, a slippery slope ending in a massive tangle of wires: a base phone plugged into the phone connection and a transformer plug-in (you know the thing about transformer plug-ins: they want to cover two outlets) and two remote phones with transformer plug-ins. We’ll come back to the phones.

Then it was the TV and Internet system, now wireless: a base plugged into the TV connection and a transformer plug-in and two remote phones with transformer plug-ins. That’s on top of plugging in the TV and the DVD player and connecting the DVD player to the TV.

The computers add their tangled web, too: connections between and plug-ins for the computer, monitor, and printer, which in our cases is a transformer plug-in. Now both computers use a powered sound system requiring another wire into the computer and another transformer plug-in.

Back to the phones. To save money, we switched to a cell-phone house line. But it turns out that our cell phones and that house phone do not get a very good signal in this building. So they give us a little unit, like a mini-cell tower, to amplify the signal in our apartment. But it plugs a line into our TV/Internet modem, and line to a windowsill, and, of course, a transformer plug-in.

In a smaller apartment all these things end up on top of each other. Then there has to be a place to charge the cell phones, cameras, and iPod. I am so glad the chargers have become universal. Plus our most recent ones do not try to cover a second outlet.

A good friend of mine believes that one day our electricity will come wireless. Can you imagine all the wires that wireless electricity will require?

What would you like to untangle?

41 thoughts on “Wireless is More”

  1. Good morning. I have a a mass of wires a little like yours, Clyde. You might have few more than I have. Good story.

    Taxes are a tangled mess that I don’t like. My whole life has been a tangled mess. I have massive amounts files, books, and very badly organized records that I have collected during my tangled life time. I would like to be rid of the tangled mess of papers and books filling shelves, filing cabinets, boxes, and just sitting around in piles. I never learned to do a good job of maintaining records and properly filing papers. Also, I have way too many books and other publications that should have been weeded out long ago.

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  2. Greetings! All those wires in the car to charge phones, the extra sound system and music that Jim must have, etc. It never ends,

    OT – I went to the audition last night for the Executioner role in Turandot coming up at Minnesota Opera. It was great fun and I’ll find out in a couple days. Thanks to PJ and other folks on the blog who brought it to my attention. We shall see!

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    3. If I said “Oh I think you would be a wonderful executioner, Joanne!” would that sound like a compliment? Here’s hoping you have fun with it.

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      1. Steve, that would be music to my ears, oddly enough. Wielding a sword correctly is a highly refined skill. But honestly, I would probably freak out if I got the part — and you all would be the first to know!

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    4. Oooh, break a leg, Joanne! I love Turandot…well, the first part, anyway. Here’s hoping some of my fortune rubs off on you–I had an interview for a new temp job yesterday, and though they told me I’d hear in a few days, they contacted my rep in a couple of hours to say they wanted me. Let us know if you get the part, and I’ll tell my opera-going friends to watch/listen for you!

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    6. So excited for you, Joanne. Like Anna, I hope to see you next month too. Already have the tickets and will be the first live opera for the S&h!

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  3. My husband’s brain and the thought patterns that take him down paths (sometimes quite quickly) to places where stress and worrying make him physically ill. Oy. Me, I eat under stress like any normal American…

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  4. My thoughts always feel just like those pictures. I have visions of pictures of power lines running off into infinity across the vista about 20 or 30 wires side by side maybe stacked 2 or 3 rows on top of each other. The embodiment of organized mass communicated data in a symmetrical parallel regimentation of thought. I can visualize but implementation is another story altogether. The ADHD my children all have learned to deal with as a treatable disorder left my student experience as far from the teachers pet list as it could have been . Over time I have come to embrace the energy and possibilities that come with the reality but those wires are the downside. I really do need to make notes and go back in time to figure out why I came to this room. I have the I phone in my hand texting and checking my google queries, with the I pad leaning up against the laptop all off in their own streams of thought following a preassigned taskmaster dictate of the moment.
    Every now and again the wires get untangled and wrapped up with Velcro ties back in the order of the master mechanics apple pie order of a toolbox but more often than not Clyde’s picture is my what my workshop benches disarray resembles. Have the worlds greatest mail, screw, nut and bolt collection as a result of putting together a presentation on that stuff for an offering to a potential customer years ago . It all got put in a couple boxes, on a pallet in a shelf in a warehouse right next to lps
    Books shoes and journal items that will end with my childhood sled being thrown in the fire along with all those other items memories and dreams only to join me and my disjointed thoughts up at the pearly gates asking st Pete if the have a good spot for a cup of earl gray a round of golf with a view of the mountains and a couple old buddies from times gone by. Rosebud.

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    1. Me too, Steve. I have some effort into a number things I think might be important and I don’t see a lot of return on that effort. Mybe I should drop some of the stuff I do and find more rewarding things to do. I am particularly think of organizations I have supported.

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  6. Congrats, CG, and good luck, Joanne!

    Clyde, I’ll bet we could each add a photo similar to yours. I’ve taken to throwing some camouflage fabric over the most visually awful ones here… And whose idea was it when these houses were built in the 1920s to place the outlet (heightwise, too) smack in the middle of a kitchen wall??

    The next “bird’s nest” I hope to untangle is the pile of papers and clipboards here, next to the computer. (Husband and I share this desk, which complicates things.) Little notes of things I was going to look up (or looked up and now require some kind of action), clipboards for the various responsibilities I’ve taken on that need computer attention. I think I’ll put on some of yesterday’s blog music while I work. 🙂

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  8. Another thing I would like to untangle is my writing. The only way I can be sure that I am not writing a tangled message is to spend a lot of time editing myself and even then I miss some of my errors. Bad typing is the cause of many of the errors. Also when I edit I sometimes add in errors when correcting other errors. My lack of skill at spelling and grammar also add to the mess.

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  9. Years ago my inlaws went to Italy and brought our son back a marrionette. The strings and wooden controller thingys got entirely twisted and tangled. I have kept it in a closet all these years hoping some day I could untangle the thing without cutting the strings.

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  10. Clyde, you must have been looking in at our house yesterday as we set up the new “cordless” phones. There is no getting around it, I am going to have to get another power strip.

    Then there is the issue of my basement. I’ve had 3 ancestral households being disbanded with the words, “take it, or never see it again”, always at a time when I really don’t have the option to even open the box in question to see what we are talking about, so the boxes just go in the basement against the day I find time to sort through them. In some cases where I have managed to go through things, I find that something important to me is thrown in with piles of my brothers’ junk that they, having first right of refusal, have denied all knowledge of (even when it clearly has their name on it, while mine appears nowhere on the offending item).

    Sure, I could just toss them without even looking, but there are several things I would really like to find that are currently AWOL. Sure, I could just do a little bit every day, but I never seem to. And then there is the stuff I could to good use, if only I wasn’t spending too much time trying to get through the dross.

    deep and heavy sigh.

    BiR, are you still in this line of business?

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    2. I need to be careful how I answer this. 🙂 Sometimes. I’m kind of on sabbatical from it right now, as my mom needs extra time and attention, but ask me again in a few months… I love doing it when people are truly ready to “downsize.”

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  11. OT – White smoke from the Vatican! New Argentinian Pope reportedly a conservative theologian. So what else is new? Apparently you don’t reach that rank in the Catholic church by advocating reform.

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    1. Except for Pope John XXIII, but he was only there 4 years when he died. Husband says he was a “breath of fresh air” and brought about some real changes.

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  13. I’ve always meant to spend some time untangling some family history. My mother’s side of the family is pretty traditional and we can chart out a family tree with some accuracy. Not so much on my father’s side. I don’t know what happened to my oldest half-sister or any of her descendants. I also had an uncle who died fairly young, leaving a wife and three children with whom no one seems to have kept in touch.

    When I think about trying to track them down, though, I remind myself that I’m not really even all that good at maintaining correspondence with the relatives I do know about. I tend to be reserved and have a really limited Christmas card list. If I found twenty or thirty long lost relatives, what would I do about it?

    I guess that’s my marionette in the closet.

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    1. I know how you feel, Linda. I have an aunt, an uncle and several nieces, nephews and grand nieces and nephews in Drogheda, Irealand where my mother grew up. I am friends with several of them on Facebook, but from what limited interaction we have there, I’m pretty sure that if I visited Ireland I would not visit them. Just don’t have a lot in common.

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  14. Two things I cannot untangle:
    1. Why heritage matters so much to some people, like my b-i-l.
    2. This afternoon in B & N: a very unsteady, very old man pushing a wheeled walker and wearing a germ mask. Sitting up proudly and boldly on the shelf of his walker was a Hollister Bag with a large photo of a studly young man nude to his hairy navel.

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