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.
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?
Trail Baboon 