How To Adapt To A Life Full Of Adaptors

There is a mischievous Fairy loose in my car. He (or she) has a singular purpose; tying the headphones from my iPod into a white, tangled mess. There can be no other reasonable explanation as to how I can place my iPod in the center console of my car after the gym, only to retrieve it a day or two later to find it knotted like the halls of Congress. And I do mean knotted. Tangled? OK. But seriously, the headphones look like they are trying to mate. I have seen; a half hitch, a halter hitch, a left hand bowline and a Carrick bend – sometimes all at once. Some people start their workouts with light cardio – I start mine fiddling with (and cursing at) wires. I do wonder if that time counts toward my workout.


I keep my iPod in the car not just out of convenience. I keep it there because of the fear that if I bring it in the house, it will migrate with the other 32,000 electronic devices in our home, rendering it nearly impossible to find when I need it. It is the same reason I never put my phone or laptop away…they would become co-opted into the Union Of Impossible To Find Devices and Adaptors. The name is a misnomer, however. Things aren’t impossible to find. It is only impossible to find what you are looking for.

I can find AC adaptors….plenty of them. I can just never find the right one. I can find adaptors for, a) cell phones we no longer own, b) games the kids haven’t used for five years, c) one’s that appear to not belong to anything (maybe the bastard offspring of A and B), and d) adaptors that seem to be designed to connect to a rather important piece of electronics, like maybe WOPR from War Games.

In ten tries you couldn’t find the correct adaptor that links my digital camera to my laptop. The real fun part is, when you do find it, you have to first figure out where the input on the camera is located (you may need a microscope since the cover is supremely camouflaged into the body of the camera), then try to insert it until you are almost convinced you have the wrong one since there are only two possible ways to do it and you have tried each one eighteen times.

And this is the other point. Why is there this seemingly contrite and selfish fetish amongst electronic manufacturers to provide different adaptors to every single model of device? When I recently switched cell phone carriers (I went with the one offering an app that gives me command over the weather) my son and I realized our phones used the same charger. No kidding, this was cause for actual celebration.

“Can you believe this, son?” I exclaimed, “Our phones use the same adaptor!” He was as stunned as I was. Never in his twelve years has he seen such a technological anomaly. He and his brother’s lives have revolved around having adaptors splayed around their room like groupies in a Motley Crue tour bus.

The upside of course, is that when we are getting packed to travel, we always have something to argue about and scramble around looking for – this usually takes place as I have my car keys in my hand.

Still, I never lose faith that the car-living, knot-tying Fairy will one day have an appetite for digesting coffee cups. Until then, I am going to look in the attic for the TV remote, I’m sure it’s up there.