I finally did the thing I've been putting off since basically January, which is deal with the drawer. You know the drawer. Everybody who's been doing this tech blogging thing since 2011 has a drawer like this, a place where cables and dongles and dead gadgets go to accumulate rather than actually get used or thrown out. Mine is the second drawer down in the kitchen sideboard, which is a genuinely insane place to keep it, but that's where it ended up sometime around 2014 and it never moved.
I counted sixteen charging cables. Sixteen. Four of them were micro-USB, which I don't think I own a single device that still takes micro-USB, unless you count the ancient Anker battery pack that also doesn't hold a charge anymore so its cable is functionally useless too. Two were the old flat white iPod cables, the 30-pin ones, from a phone and an iPod both of which have been gone for probably a decade. One was a proprietary charger for a Fitbit Charge HR that I wore for exactly four months in 2016 before I got tired of it buzzing at me. I have no idea why I kept the charger and not the Fitbit.
The rest were USB-C, or Lightning, or USB-A-to-USB-C, in various lengths and various states of fraying near the connector. I plugged in about eight of them just to see which still worked. Five did. Three didn't, and one of those three sparked a tiny bit when I touched the connector to the port, which, cool, that one's going straight in the trash and not the recycling bin.
Speaking of the recycling bin, can I just say the e-waste drop-off situation at my local Best Buy is a mess. There's this one bin by the door that's always half full of stuff that clearly should not be there, like a broken microwave someone just left leaning against it once. I don't think anyone's mad at Best Buy specifically for this, it's more that curbside e-waste pickup basically doesn't exist where I live and the store bin is the only option that isn't driving forty minutes to a county facility that's open Tuesday and Thursday mornings only, which is a schedule apparently designed for nobody with a job.
Anyway. I ended up keeping five cables, all USB-C, all tested and working, all coiled properly instead of just shoved in a ball, which is a small victory I'm choosing to be proud of. Everything else went into a shoebox that's now sitting by the front door waiting for me to actually drive it to the recycling place, which, we'll see. History suggests that shoebox has maybe a 60% chance of making the trip before it quietly gets absorbed back into the house somehow.
The thing that got me thinking about this whole exercise, honestly, is how much better the cable situation has gotten in just the last couple years without me really noticing it happen in real time. USB-C is genuinely everywhere now. My laptop charger, my phone, my headphones, my kid's tablet, the battery pack in my bag, all one connector. That didn't used to be true and I sort of forgot it didn't used to be true until I was staring at a pile of orphaned proprietary tips from three different eras of gadget ownership. It's the kind of standardization that doesn't feel like a big deal when it's happening gradually but is actually a pretty big deal in hindsight. Fewer things to keep track of, fewer drawers like mine, in theory.
I'm not going to pretend I have some grand unified theory about consumer electronics from cleaning out a kitchen drawer on a random Tuesday in March. Mostly I just wanted somewhere to put the fact that I found a Fitbit charger for a device I stopped wearing ten years ago, because that felt like it deserved to be written down somewhere. If you've got a drawer like this too, I'd genuinely be curious what's the oldest dead thing you're still hanging onto a cable for. Mine might be beat by the 30-pin ones, honestly. Those things are basically fossils at this point.