I sometimes joke that I once had the distinction of being the only known person in the Continental United States who managed to completely weed out all “unidentified mystery items” from her office drawer of cords, chargers, and other electronic impedimenta. You know, those chargers for battery packs and other things that are long gone. Or those mysterious A/V cords with yellow or red ends, that are supposed to be plugged into the back of some portable speaker or CD player you donated to Amvets or Goodwill ages ago, and the cords you never used anyway even while you had that device in your possession because it seemed to work fine without them.
Yet you can’t 100% be sure you remember what devices those cords and things are supposed to go with, so you hang onto them, afraid to throw them away. Sometimes you KNOW FOR A FACT that a charger belonged to a phone that died, and still out of superstition you hang onto it. (Surely I’m not the only one?)
Well, one day sometime in 2009 I cleaned out that drawer for real, and for years afterward I existed in the blissful state of ONLY having plugs and chargers and cords that I could actually identify as belonging to devices I still had in my possession. Ah, ecstasy!
Recently, though, a few strays have crept in. Still, it’s a big improvement; they all still fit into a ziploc baggie, which fits neatly into a drawer in my kitchen, and hopefully should not be too hard to sort out.
An electronic device I let go of recently was a pair of speakers I inherited from my Mom’s house. They have a base station that they must connect to by wire, and also each one needs to be plugged in to a wall plug for power. In other words, the two speakers require a total of three power outlets. All those wires notwithstanding, the label on the box reassures the consumer that these are “wireless speakers.” I donated these to my AmVets thrift shop. I will keep my itty bitty baby speaker that’s the size of my smartphone, uses only one cord, and produces better sound than the big fancy “wireless speakers” pictured above.
Interesting backdrop to the wireless speakers: At one point they were sitting on top of a quilt made by one of my aunts, who was an epic quilter right up until she passed away a couple years back. The quilt measures about 6 feet by 7 feet, and every single stitch was made by hand.
(By the way, speaking of drawers and the decluttering thereof, I was also at one point possibly the only known person in the Continental United States to clean out her drawer of sauce packets from Chinese takeouts. I actually used up all those little packets of soy sauce and hot mustard and duck sauce! But at some point over the past year or so, I seem to have accumulated a full jar again! Hey, at least now I’ve wised up and confined them neatly in a jar, rather than filling up a corner of a kitchen drawer where they somehow, despite being sealed packets, manage to leach their brown and yellow and peachy-orange goo all inside the drawer.)