Every house has a nest....a coiled conglomeration tucked in a drawer, hidden in a cabinet or stuffed in a box somewhere. It looks as if we've discovered the den of some electronic rodent. The only thing missing would be a few clicking and whirring offspring, their red little LED eyes staring up at us. The nest always consists of the same type of material; the little DC adapters that get separated from the devices that need them.
How does this happen? And when it does, why can't we reunite the wall warts with their hosts?
Here's my take on the evolution of the "nest."
For some odd reason that I have yet to understand, most adapters do not have the name of the product they are used with stamped on them. There are some notable exceptions, and those exceptions are the reasons that those particular adapters rarely end up in the nest. We actually KNOW WHICH PRODUCT THEY ARE USED WITH. For some reason, the Toshiba answering machine I bought years ago came with a 3.43 VDC adapter marked something like "China Adapterco," not Toshiba. The answering machine is long gone, but for some reason, the adapter still resides in the nest. Why? Because despite there being 58 different sized little thingy ends that adapter companies use, this particular adapter looks exactly the same or similar to nearly all the other adapters for nearly every small product in my house.
I know I have an extra modem. Could that be the adapter that works with it? Or maybe it's the one from that clock radio in the closet. Not sure how it got separated, but I wouldn't want to ACCIDENTALLY THROW AWAY THE ADAPTER I MIGHT NEED. So it ends up where? In the nest. Somehow the nest has 34 adapters all hopelessly tangled together with the odd RCA cable or wired computer mouse. Problem is, I only have 8 items in my house that's require an adapter, and all of them have the adapter with it. So how....? Well, you never know when you might NEED an adapter. After all, you could possibly misplace one, right? Never hurts to have an extra.... Oh, so naive am I. What we never seem to realize is that those adapters all have a specific voltage. Combine that with the 58 different possible little end thingys that insert into the host and you've got the potential for 43,667 different varieties of adapters, all of which look the same. Sure, your video game adapter fries.... Where to do you go first? The nest of course! You pull out the knot of 34 adapters out of 43,667 different ones that are possible. This gives you a statistical possibility of matching your dead adapter of about 1 in 1,200 or about .08%. Invariably the 34 adapters go back in the drawer...a little more knotted than before because "you never know. "
This whole scenario is multiplied in size many orders of magnitude when you have a business. There are so many electronic gadgets...printers, faxes, cordless phones, cell phones, monitors.... I recently found a nest that must have weighed 20 pounds in a box behind some packing materials on a shelf unit at my business. I stared at it for a moment and then proceeded to do one the riskiest things I've ever undertaken in my life. I threw the entire nest into the trash. As I stood there perspiring from the stress, I thought about pulling it back out of the trash and shoving back into that box on the shelf... "What if you throw away one you need???? Then what?!" It's been a year since I did that and the earth didn't stop turning. I've never found an item in a drawer or anywhere else that required one of the adapters I tossed. I say, go get that nest America, and toss that shit out. It'll be cathartic. I promise. You'll never look back.
Despite that happening a year ago, a few days ago I found a new nest forming in a drawer with the stapler and the post-its.... How? I have no earthly idea. As you sit reading this, one is forming in your home...slowly and insidiously, seemingly by itself. It's a fact of life. ;-)
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Perspective
It had been a pretty bad storm. Lots of lightning. One bolt close enough to startle a building full of people at work. Then I got a text: "Are you coming home soon?" Pretty normal words on most days, but that particular text, shrouded in it's unemotional font on my phone screen, failed to express the gravity of the situation. I sent a text back, jokingly..."Is my house burning?" No response. I dismissed it and went on about my business as the rain outside subsided.
A few minutes later, my phone rang. The voice on the other end was cracking with fright and confusion. "When are you coming home?!!" It was that unmistakable tone and sense of urgency that nobody ever wants to hear. Its the moment you know that something very, very bad has happened. My heart leapt and vision became narrowed as I inquired further. "Please...come home quickly! The firemen are cutting a hole in the side of your house with axes and there's smoke! I heard something during the storm. I don't know what's happening..." The voice trailed off...a mixture of hysteria and sadness.
The 15 minute ride home was a tough one. There's the need to resist pressing the accelerator to the floor, which could endanger myself and others not to mention attracting the unwanted attention of state troopers. All sorts of visions are going through my mind. Charred remains. Where do I sleep? Insurance. Rebuilding. All my things. I had 15 minutes to come to terms and accept that everything could be gone. All of it.
All the grappling with the everyday clutter of others must have had an effect on me. I felt relatively calm. Relatively. The idea of having nothing was oddly...intriguing. I had always thought about what it might be like to live life with not much more than what was on my back. But this wasn't the way I wanted to explore that intrigue.
As I got closer to home I scanned the horizon for a dark pall of smoke that would likely indicate a building consumed by flames in the distance. There was none. But as I turned the corner to my street, I felt anxiety wash over me. Three fire trucks....not good. The neighbors gathered outside in a ring...the indignity of it isn't something I want to experience again. The last light of day was waning and thankfully I saw no tongues of orange leaping from the roof. I rushed up to one of the firefighters who explained that there had been a fire in the wall caused by lightning. The fire melted the water pipe joints and they had to shut off the water to keep the house from flooding. He wanted to show me what had happened.
As I opened from door I remember the acrid smell of burnt insulation, plastic pipes and wood but the house seemed intact. In the hazy flashlight beam I could see the ceiling in the bath pulled down to check for flame, lots of water from the burst pipe and some charred areas on the wall, but everything else was intact and undamaged. With electric and water off, I decided to sleep elsewhere. As I left, I opened all the windows...and sighed. Deeply. Daylight revealed that a bolt of lightning punched through the house and grounded at the copper pipes, causing a fire in the wall that was probably extinguished when the pipe burst. Damage was confined to the bathroom. I never imagined I'd be thankful for a burst pipe and that I wasn't home for the event.
In the moments between the phone call and the aftermath, there was a lot to be reckoned with. I don't recall that I freaked out. There was a period of clarity. Perspective, if you will. As I steeled myself for the worst, I thought "It's just stuff. I'll go on. I'm OK if it's all gone." Events like this have the power to alter the direction of one's life. It could be the impetus to relocate or perhaps change how life is lived. I've written plenty about how the pursuit of things over experiences can dull life's shine. I still believe that...even more so now. In essence, I passed my own pop quiz. If you were faced with the possibility of losing every material thing you owned, how do you think it would affect you? The answers might say a lot about how material things figure in your life. Hopefully, a frantic call won't be required to find those answers.
A few minutes later, my phone rang. The voice on the other end was cracking with fright and confusion. "When are you coming home?!!" It was that unmistakable tone and sense of urgency that nobody ever wants to hear. Its the moment you know that something very, very bad has happened. My heart leapt and vision became narrowed as I inquired further. "Please...come home quickly! The firemen are cutting a hole in the side of your house with axes and there's smoke! I heard something during the storm. I don't know what's happening..." The voice trailed off...a mixture of hysteria and sadness.
The 15 minute ride home was a tough one. There's the need to resist pressing the accelerator to the floor, which could endanger myself and others not to mention attracting the unwanted attention of state troopers. All sorts of visions are going through my mind. Charred remains. Where do I sleep? Insurance. Rebuilding. All my things. I had 15 minutes to come to terms and accept that everything could be gone. All of it.
All the grappling with the everyday clutter of others must have had an effect on me. I felt relatively calm. Relatively. The idea of having nothing was oddly...intriguing. I had always thought about what it might be like to live life with not much more than what was on my back. But this wasn't the way I wanted to explore that intrigue.
As I got closer to home I scanned the horizon for a dark pall of smoke that would likely indicate a building consumed by flames in the distance. There was none. But as I turned the corner to my street, I felt anxiety wash over me. Three fire trucks....not good. The neighbors gathered outside in a ring...the indignity of it isn't something I want to experience again. The last light of day was waning and thankfully I saw no tongues of orange leaping from the roof. I rushed up to one of the firefighters who explained that there had been a fire in the wall caused by lightning. The fire melted the water pipe joints and they had to shut off the water to keep the house from flooding. He wanted to show me what had happened.
As I opened from door I remember the acrid smell of burnt insulation, plastic pipes and wood but the house seemed intact. In the hazy flashlight beam I could see the ceiling in the bath pulled down to check for flame, lots of water from the burst pipe and some charred areas on the wall, but everything else was intact and undamaged. With electric and water off, I decided to sleep elsewhere. As I left, I opened all the windows...and sighed. Deeply. Daylight revealed that a bolt of lightning punched through the house and grounded at the copper pipes, causing a fire in the wall that was probably extinguished when the pipe burst. Damage was confined to the bathroom. I never imagined I'd be thankful for a burst pipe and that I wasn't home for the event.
In the moments between the phone call and the aftermath, there was a lot to be reckoned with. I don't recall that I freaked out. There was a period of clarity. Perspective, if you will. As I steeled myself for the worst, I thought "It's just stuff. I'll go on. I'm OK if it's all gone." Events like this have the power to alter the direction of one's life. It could be the impetus to relocate or perhaps change how life is lived. I've written plenty about how the pursuit of things over experiences can dull life's shine. I still believe that...even more so now. In essence, I passed my own pop quiz. If you were faced with the possibility of losing every material thing you owned, how do you think it would affect you? The answers might say a lot about how material things figure in your life. Hopefully, a frantic call won't be required to find those answers.
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