The Drawer of Dead Cables

Spent about two hours this Sunday afternoon doing something I've been putting off since roughly the Obama administration: emptying the drawer. You know the one. Everybody's got one. Mine lives under the TV stand and it has not been fully emptied since we moved into this apartment, which means there was stuff in there from at least three addresses ago.

Final count, because I actually wrote it down like a weirdo: 34 cables, 11 wall chargers, 6 mystery dongles I couldn't identify even after Googling the model numbers stamped on the side, 2 dead mice, a USB hub from what I'm fairly sure was 2014, and one (1) actual Palm Treo charger that I am choosing to believe I kept on purpose and not by accident. There was also a single earbud. Just the one. No idea where its partner went or how long ago that breakup happened.

Here's the thing that got me sitting on the floor for way longer than two hours should require: I could identify maybe eight of those 34 cables with any confidence. The rest were just cables. Black, white, coiled, frayed at one end, all doing the exact same job of being a rectangle on one end and a different rectangle on the other, and I genuinely could not tell you which device any of them used to belong to. Some giant device graveyard fed this drawer for over a decade and I never once thought to ask where the bodies went.

I'm not going to pretend this is some profound statement about consumerism, because honestly it's mostly just my own bad habit of never throwing anything out in case I "need it later." I have never once needed it later. Not once in eleven years of blogging about this exact category of stuff have I gone back into an old cable drawer and had a moment of triumphant vindication. It's always just clutter waiting to be clutter.

What did surprise me, going through it, is how much of the pile was Micro USB. I'd sort of mentally filed that format away as ancient history already, but there it was, cable after cable, a whole little era of cheap Bluetooth speakers and off-brand power banks all standardized on a connector that always went in upside down on the first try. USB-C has genuinely fixed that specific annoyance and I don't think that gets said enough. I know some people are still salty about the EU forcing the issue on iPhones, but as someone staring at a drawer that is basically a fossil record of connector standards, I'm fully on the side of "yes, mandate it, mandate all of it, I don't want to do this again in 2035."

I kept exactly four cables. Two USB-C, a lightning cable for the old iPad that's still limping along as a bedside alarm clock, and the Palm Treo charger, which I am aware makes no sense since I don't own a Palm Treo and haven't since maybe 2008. Everything else went into a bag for the e-waste drop-off at the hardware store two blocks over, the one that started taking electronics a couple years back and I never actually used until today.

Weighed the bag before I left. 6.2 pounds of stuff I paid real money for at some point, none of which I could sell, none of which anyone wants, most of which will get shredded down into raw material and, statistically, some tiny fraction of that material might eventually end up in a new phone I'll buy in four years and also eventually throw in a drawer. That's the loop. I don't have a fix for it, I just noticed it more than usual today because I was sitting on my kitchen floor at 2pm surrounded by dead electronics instead of doing literally anything more productive with a Sunday.

Anyway. Drawer's empty. It will not stay that way. Give it eighteen months and I'll be back here writing the sequel post, probably about whatever cable format replaces USB-C, assuming one ever does. Until then the under-TV real estate is mine again, and there is something small and dumb and satisfying about that.