The Secret Lives Of Cables

After lengthy consideration I've came to the conclusion that the real purpose of cables is not what we've always thought it was. We have cables carrying power, phone signals, computer communications and assume this is their purpose. It is not; their real purpose if to get tangled up with each other. No matter how tidy you try to be in looping cables round objects to keep them together, or using cable-tidies, they seem hell bent on getting tangled with their colleagues.

It's like they have lives of their own with all that entails, like forming relationships, fighting etc. The next time you find yourself trying to untangle your speaker cable from your phone cable to rearrange furniture, ask yourself if you're splitting up a relationship, and whether it would be kinder to ensure they're together in the new location. Maybe the realities of packing are to blame as cables are folded back and forth on each other to fit into boxes, which means that by the time they get to their new home the pattern is set into them, causing them to jut out at odd angles, no matter how you try to place them. You have to fight against their preconditioning to get them even halfway neat.

Maybe we should be campaigning for cable rights, allowing cables to be born in factories, raised in warehouses and shop shelves to be free of this preconditioning so that when we get them they are compliant to our needs. Of course each vendor deciding to use a different cable for their device when they don't need to just adds to the hassle, although the EU has recently been in talks with vendors to agree a standard power adapter they can all use. So, one giant leap for cable-kind then.