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. ;-)
