I recently became so frustrated with all the cables littering my office I decided I would sort through them and remove all the unnecessary ones. "Cables are like a bunch of keys", I reasoned. "Over time, we accumulate more and more of them because we are afraid to remove the ones which seem to be surplus to requirements. Just in case." Every few years, when the volume of keys on my key ring amounts to a tympanic, spike laden tennis ball of metal, like something from the mind of Marcel Duchamp [1], I do a purge. Surely a purge of cables would be similar?
I found some letter labels and set to work labeling each cable by its function in life and hanging them up on hooks, neatly shackled by alligator clips. The alligator clips are very important here. It is a well known fact that the evil cable elves come into people's offices at 3 a.m. to tangle up any cables that are not tied down. The same elves that go into your attic every January, find the Christmas Tree lights and jumble them up into a terrible tangle for you to find next December.
Then I counted them. How many? Go on. Have a guess.
Laptop Power Cable - 1 cable
USB mouse - 1 cable
External USB hub - 1 cable
Parallel Printer - 2 cables (power + centronics)
Mobile Phone - 2 cables (charger + modem cable)
MP3 Player - 2 cables (power + USB)
Digital Camera - 2 cables (power + USB)
Digital Camcorder - 2 cables (power + USB)
External backup hard disk - 2 cables (power + USB)
Memory Card Reader - 1 cable
Analog Modem - 2 cables
ISDN Modem - 2 cables
Ethernet - 1 cable
That adds up to 21 cables. That is a lot of cables! Taking the power cables out still leaves 12. Yet by and large cabling is not a big problem for PC users. Why? Because many cabling problems end up being physical. Bad connections, connections not made and so on. Diagnosing physical cable problems is a pretty straightforward mechanical exercise. You start at one end of the wire and you trace it through to the other end. If it pops out of the spaghetti-style mess of cables at the point it should, then all is well.
From time to him we hear the clamor that the cabling situation is getting silly and we should all jump up and down to make the vendors provide wireless this and wireless that. Wireless - the argument goes - is the way to get rid of the problem of wires.
Unfortunately, this is a bit of a simplification. Sure, using wireless instead of wires removes the problem side of spaghetti. However, it also removes the good side of spaghetti. Namely, the ability to trace a connection from one point to another point.
I'm comfortable with my 21 cables today as they are all wired. I can handle them. Could I handle 12 if they were all wireless? Where would I even start to debug it? How can you trace spaghetti if you cannot see it?
I'm not looking forward to it but I'm resigned to its eventual arrival.
Progress giveth but progress also taketh away.
[1] http://www.abcgallery.com/D/duchamp/duchamp2.html
