So it's the last week of June, it's hot enough that my office (which is really just the corner of the bedroom with the good window) turns into a greenhouse by 2pm, and instead of doing literally any of the three paying things I should be doing, I spent Sunday going through the cable drawer. You know the one. Everyone has one.
Mine lives in an old IKEA Alex drawer unit I bought back when this blog was maybe two years old, and I have never once fully emptied it until this weekend. What I found was basically a core sample of my entire tech life since 2011.
A Palm-style sync cradle cable that fits nothing I own. Three separate mini-USB cables, none of which go to anything currently in this house, I checked, I have a label maker that still somehow takes mini-USB in the year 2026, which feels like a small crime against consistency. A 30-pin iPod dock connector, the fat white one, still coiled in the little twist-tie from whenever I bought it. And maybe nine, I counted nine, USB-A to micro-USB cables, which is wild given that I don't think I own a single device anymore that charges over micro-USB.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not a new one but living through the drawer made it fresh again: USB-C was supposed to fix this. It was the whole pitch. One connector, every device, cable chaos over, done. And technically that's true now — my phone, my laptop, my headphones, my keyboard, even my electric toothbrush all use USB-C. But the cables themselves are not interchangeable in any way that matters. Some do data, some don't. Some do 100 watts, some cap out at 15 and will happily "charge" a laptop overnight into a battery percentage lower than when you plugged it in (ask me how I know, ask me about the Tuesday morning I discovered this at 7am with a call at 7:30). A couple of mine do Thunderbolt, most don't, and there is no way to tell any of this apart just by looking at the connector. So the shape problem got solved and a worse, invisible problem replaced it. I'd almost rather go back to guessing by connector shape than guessing by cable and hoping.
Anyway. I ended up keeping exactly four cables from the whole drawer purge — two braided USB-C ones I actually trust for fast charging, one USB-A-to-C for the car, and one ancient but weirdly indestructible Lightning cable I'm keeping out of pure sentimentality even though nothing in the house takes Lightning anymore. Everything else went into a ziploc bag destined for the e-waste bin at the hardware store on Route 9, the one that actually recycles this stuff instead of just landfilling it with extra steps.
The part that got me a little sad, honestly, was the 30-pin dock cable. That thing represents a very specific stretch of my life, apartment number two, a job I liked, a lot of podcasts listened to on a commute that doesn't exist anymore because I work from the bedroom-corner-office now. I almost kept it. Then I remembered I don't own the dock, the speaker, or the iPod it went with, and threw it out anyway. Sentimentality has limits, apparently, and mine caps out at "does this object serve any function whatsoever."
If you want the boring practical takeaway: label your cables. I bought a $6 pack of cable tags off Amazon Monday and I'm slowly going through and marking wattage on the ones I kept, because future-me clearly cannot be trusted to remember which one is the good one. Past-me clearly couldn't either, which is the whole reason the drawer looked like an archaeological site in the first place.
Going to go sit somewhere with air conditioning now. This heat is not it.