Widgets and dongles and adapters, oh my!
At various times in my life I’ve thought that it would be nice to have one of those nifty headphone splitters so that when I fly somewhere with another person, we can both listen to the same device, or watch a movie on a laptop. I’ve owned at least three of them, but I have never successfully used one. Over the course of my lifetime I’ve spent, cumulatively, at least two hours trying to locate headphone splitters. Like any geek, I have numerous drawers full of nameless technological devices, not one of which has ever gone missing, except for the elusive headphone splitter.
I’m quite certain that next time I move, I will find a secret cache of indescribable pieces of hardware – widgets, dongles, adapters – each of which plugs into nothing I still own or can even remember owning. But I’ll keep them. I have to. They may come in handy one day, when for some reason a friend has a dire need for a 2-inch USB extender or a Centronics SCSI terminator (I don’t think I have any friends who would get themselves into such a pickle, but one never knows), both of which I can locate in a heartbeat. Most likely, the heaps of essentially useless items are obscuring the view of my headphone splitter, which is up to something entirely mischievous at the bottom of the drawer (though clearly, it is not procreating, because unlike other adapters, headphone splitters vanish instead of multiplying).
My predicament brought to mind a great article declaring war on dongly things that Douglas Adams wrote almost ten years ago, and which still holds true.