Cords

My philosophic venture forth today is to propose that there are few things that can render a relatively sane person (note my use of the adverb relatively) completely blind with rage and bleeding profanity and insanity than wrestling with power cords and other useless compilations of wiring encased in plastic or rubber and which lead to various electrical/telephonic dust-collectors.

My current panting (and repentant prayers for my utterances) is the result of a space-saving plan for a calm and entertaining productivity on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. For the past few months, the phone/internet ridiculosity of plastic has sat quite unattractively (and dining-inhibitingly) on my tiny table in the kitchen. Wires in five-mile proliferation were just hanging all over the place at the foot of the table, and I hated them daily (so I had to pile some Miracle Gro potting soil bags in front of them, which admittedly did not help the dining experience either).

Well, in a burst of inspiration, it seemed a good idea to scootch my dresser into the kitchen next to the back door, this allowing me to hide these unbecoming wires and add a nice lamp into kitchen ambience (as overhead lighting makes me feel ill). A secondary benefit of said lamp idea would be to partly hide the phone connection wire which hangs from approximately the height of my nose and down to the floor (what idiot engineer did that I would certainly like to smack heartily).

From the floor level, this absurd wire has been trailed and tacked along the dustboard towards the doorway to the rest of the house, makes a right turn at doorway, goes under doorway to end at next corner of the room. One additional absurdity of this assemblage is enough dust collected on a bi-weekly basis (hidden between cord and dustboard and in particular piles at the tack points) to create a new Adam -- and maybe even an Eve.

Dresser was scootched in small increments due to my rebellious and completely unfestive back. And it was good. And Amrie was pleased with her idea.

It was good until she attempted to corral these damnable cords. When one would get untangled and corralled in a little twist-tie, the plastic phone base would go shooting off in another direction, crash to the floor and lose its power lead. Power lead would then have to be disentangled (from the phone lines and other two power cords) and reattached to the base, at which point the phone line would get itself back stuck in the threading tacks. And then you try to unhitch it, only to find that you are instead tugging and detaching the cable lead which is also attached to dustboards with those annoying tacks and which leads from nowhere and to nowhere. Why it is here is a mystery, but the kitchen grease and dust sticking to it indicate antiquity. When you tug on this lead, it does not come unhitched easily, leaving the tacks on the wall, it detaches the tacks leaving 1/4-inch diameter holes in the wall. (These can be shoved back in with the hope they go unnoticed as 'damage'.) Then the internet box falls over on its face, jerking the phone line to the back of the trashcan quite inconveniently. Imagine various brooms and mops are also falling out of the doorway corner next to this melee and clanging into the metal trashcan (rubbish bin) in a most unsettling manner. This whole process was repeated several times.

At long last, five miles of cords, phone lines, etc. were simply shoved under the back of the dresser in a fitful swivet. However, in yet another demonstration of engineering genius, the stupid power plugs are of varying shapes and sizes, preventing any stowage of the power strip underneath anything. Why some clever electrical creator cannot invent a unified prototype for power plugs is beyond me. And I do NOT wish to hear any silly excuses like ampage or wattage or something silly. If 'they' can continue to create smaller and smaller memory storage and tinier and tinier MP3 players, surely some gorgeous geek can get to work on this and help the aesthetics of homes around the world.

And then my tea was cold.
Now I need a lie down and some Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.
And some fudge.