I LOVE the fact that, nowadays, if something is preying on your mind and you can’t quite work out a solution, you can just slap it into Google – even misspelt – and the answers pour forth.
I finally got a laptop quite recently after giving up the unequal struggle to keep a toehold on the family computer. I say ‘family’ – it used to be mine. All mine. I suffered the increasingly frequent incursions of Child One and Child Two, but now with Children Three and Four also vying for computer time, not to mention TL trying to use the blimmin thing every night after work, it was time to admit defeat.
Admittedly, I am hardly slumming it now with my swanky new laptop (though I notice TL upgraded the fixed computer the moment I stopped using it, harumph) but it’s taken me some time to get used to the smaller, fiddlier keyboard and I hated the trackpad so much that I’ve attached a mouse, which looks a bit like a horse-drawn carriage attached to a sleek jumbo jet. Never mind. I am now fully embracing the fact that I can take my work anywhere, ie avoid the rest of the family, and tuck myself away somewhere where almost no one can interrupt. Ok, that last bit is wishful thinking but I am definitely working on it.
In the meantime, the charging cable of the laptop started to seriously annoy me. It’s divided into two bits, no doubt for frantically sensible techie reasons, but it just makes it look uglier. The halves are connected by a large white slab of plastic. The whole thing is a nightmare of octopus-like flailing white tentacles, and makes any space instantly messy. I’ve been looking at it for a while and thinking, seriously? Was this the best you could do? After all, this is a company world-renowned for its minimalist design and serious chic ethic. There is nothing extraneous on their machines, to the extent that, with the fixed computer upgrade, we suddenly found we had lost our last CD player and I have had to play my mindfulness CDs in the car.
Then I realised that no thought is entirely original these days. If I was getting cross about the cables, then probably several trillion people had already worried, pondered, cried ‘eureka’ and solved my problem for me. Sure enough, as soon as I Googled ‘tidy charging wires’, a tsunami of advice came my way. YouTube is stuffed to the gills with ernest young men folding white wires every which way. To be fair, the company itself deserves some credit for having clever fold-out prong things on the white brick which you can wrap the wires round – but maybe they could mention that to customers?
To save you the trouble of even Googling, here are my before and afters:
