Real Men Have Big Cables

So the other day I did the unthinkable. I went to Wal-Mart. Now don’t get me wrong, Wal-Mart has a very large selection of goods at very low prices. There’s nothing questionable about that. I just don’t particularly care to go to the discount super center. It just seems to me that it is much more of a hassle than it is worth.

Even when I try to go during off-peak hours, there still are far too many crowds of people at the local Wal-Mart. This bothers me seeing as I have an absolute disdain for people in general. In addition, they can be even more annoying when I’m shopping. When I’m in a store, I’m on a mission. I’m not there to peruse the stocked items; I’m there to pick up exactly what I need then get out so I can get back to playing video games. I’ve got the mentality of a 14 year old, so sue me.

Now I don’t hate people just because they’re human. I generally just dislike large groups of people. For some reason, when people are large groups, whether it’s planned or not, they tend to act like idiots. I’m not sure if there’s some sort of psychological reason this happens, I never did put much stock in that Freud guy. But I do know that this generalization seems to get worse when people shop. I don’t know why, I don’t want to know why; I just wish people would avoid me when they feel the idiocy about to sting them.

So you may be asking yourself why I would willingly go to Wal-Mart when I hate shopping so much. Well, if you must know, I finally got off my lazy rear end and went to pick up an adapter for my TV. I’m sure most of you have one of those fancy new HDTV’s with about 18 different audio and video inputs available. My television, however, is a piece of shit. And I mean that in the nicest way possible. Well, no I don’t, my TV sucks.

In addition to all of the other things that I’m not overly fond of about it, the TV in my living room has only one input for the audio/video cables. A few months before, that wasn’t a problem. The cable box connects to the cable jack and my DVD player hooked in fine with the familiar yellow, red, and white wires. However, just before Thanksgiving I was lucky enough to snag a brand new Nintendo Wii at its initial release. So then I had to unplug my DVD player just to play with my Wii and conversely, I had to disable the Nintendo in order to watch a DVD. This was clearly unacceptable.

I could duplicate the setup that I have in my bedroom, but to be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure how I managed to get everything to work in there. I’ll just give you a quick run down of my bedroom set-up: I have a mini-fridge that is used to chill refreshing beverages as well as act as a mini-entertainment center. On top of the fridge is my small TV. On top of that lays my Nintendo Gamecube and my Playstaion 2 (new version, much smaller than the original). The space between the fridge and the futon is home to the SNES, some sort of adapter, the cable modem, and a power strip that is probably overloaded far in excess of its safety parameters. How I got the cable and three game systems on an old Sony TV is anyone’s guess. There’s far too many lines back there for me come to any sane conclusion.

I’m sure you know how much trouble it can be to get back there and start fooling around with wires and cables and all that nonsense. It is a veritable jungle behind the mini-fridge with its own ecosystem entirely independent from the rest of the apartment. I’m fairly certain whole species of new creatures have been borne and gone extinct within these myriads of wires, dust, and electrical current.

So this past weekend, I finally relinquished my laziness, broke down, and bought an adapter that allows four separate devices to be hooked into it and then hooks individually into my living room TV. Oh, and it’s fancy too. I don’t even have to press any buttons to choose between using the DVD player or the Nintendo. The adapter automatically recognizes which device is on and will switch to that device without my input.

I know, it’s impressive. So impressive, in fact, that the adapter didn’t come with any cables of its own. It didn’t come with the audio/video cables I needed to hook the adapter into my TV nor (and more importantly) did it come with a power cable. Of course, I didn’t realize it was without the required AC adapter until I started setting it up. I don’t know who thought up the bright idea of making a unit such as that without a readily available means of acquiring electricity from my wall, but whatever person made that decision, they just reaffirmed my beliefs in humanity’s constant idiocy.

Luckily for me, I tend to be a pack rat when it comes to electronical things (and yes, I do realize I just made that word up). I have at least two boxes full of old cables and batteries and all sorts of electronic parts whose origins elude me. Amidst the UCB cables and speaker wire I did find the AC adapter from my old and now defunct laptop computer, as well as another cable to link my TV to the new adapter. In a sense, I was victorious.

So take that corporate America! I realize that you vend your wires and connecters separately so you can charge more and milk us plebeians for our hard earned wages. But as for me, I do not need to additionally purchase your independently packaged wares. I am free of your artificial price gouging. And this isn’t the first time I have escaped your vile clutches either.

When I bought my printer almost a year ago, I was pretty happy since I got it on sale. It’s one of those multi-tasking printers. In addition to putting words on a sheet of paper, it also scans, copies, faxes, fires “Patriot” surface to air missiles, wards my office from the undead, and eats dead orphans. I didn’t exactly ask for that last bit of functionality, it just… um, came with the whole package. What didn’t come in the deal, however, was the USB cable that was needed to connect the printer to my computing machine. This cable is, well, it’s pretty damned important. The printer won’t print, or do any of its various other tasks, without this cable. Oh, and Best Buy charges somewhere around $30 a foot for the stupid cable. Yeah, that’s almost as much as the whole printer cost me. And does the cable eat dead orphans? I think not.

Once again, my pack ratting skills came into play. (Did I just make up another word there?) At the time, I had two unused USB cables lying in a box in my closet. For some strange reason I felt like I had abused the system by not paying an exorbitant rate for a brand new piece of wire to go with my new ultra functional printer. And you know what, it felt good.

With all of those cables hooked up and lying about, it’s no small wonder my apartment has yet to go up in flames. I wonder if my renter’s insurance policy covers electrical fires of gross incompetence. I should probably read over that. But in the meantime, please keep any live orphans away from my printer. The owner’s manual states that it expressly consumes the dead kind of orphans. But I think in this case it’s best to not take any chances.