There is a wormhole in the kitchen.
OK, not my kitchen. There is one, however, in every workplace kitchen. This has been the case since back when I held down a permanent job last century, right up to today as a freelance whether it’s at a clients' premises or a co-working space.
When I arrive nice and early in the morning, I stride past the kitchen or kitchenette, admiring how spotless and twinkly it is from the deft attentions of the overnight cleaning contractors. It does not stay that way for long.
It only takes a few seconds to pick my hot-desk location for the day since it's always the same one, i.e. the only hot-desk not already baggsied by someone else the night before by leaving a spare jacket/cardigan/set of false teeth hanging on the back of the chair, i.e. the shitty desk next to the fire exit door that doesn't quite shut properly and lets the weather in.
Pausing only a moment to brush away the mini snowdrift (winter) or stack of dead flies (summer) that has accumulated next to the power block, I put down my backpack and head straight back to the kitchen to brew up some chai.
When I get there, barely a minute after I passed it earlier, the kitchen has transformed into a disaster zone. Spilt milk, coffee and various puddles of water cover every level surface. Brown liquid of different shades are splattered artistically across the walls. The floor is carpeted with a layer of granulated sugar and broken mug handles which crunch unpleasantly underfoot.
Torn cardboard boxes and heaps of scrunched sheets of kitchen towel are arranged around the edge of the vast but glaringly empty dustbin. A cupboard door is swinging open on its only remaining hinge. The cutlery drawer has been pulled out and is now face-down in the sink. The kettle is on its side. The microwave is on fire. Where the dishwasher used to be is now a smouldering hole in the floor.
No worries, the cleaners will be back overnight to put it all shipshape again, wipe down the surfaces and shovel away any charred body parts.
As I have no doubt mused on previous occasions, it makes one wonder what people's houses must be like if their workplace kitchen etiquette extends to the personal domicile as well. This isn't meant as a "bah dropping standards etc" whinge but a genuine interest in what the otherwise sane and talented individuals I meet in offices get up to in the privacy of their own homes.
For a start, I know as a fact that a lot of IT dudes have installed voice-activated ‘clever’ speaker devices even though they (of all people) ought to know better. I am literally the only person I know in IT journalism who doesn’t own an Alexa device or some such personal-data-butt-rodgering home spy. And even before the proliferation of consumer-targeted SmartWank arrived on the scene, contract colleagues would boast about how they bought an old X-box on eBay for a tenner and reconfigured as a NAS to stream MP3s to speakers in different rooms.
Admit it, you love doing stuff like that. It's more fun than tiling the bathroom.
A couple of years ago there was supposed to have been a fad among middle-aged musos for recreating well-known tunes using the 8bit audio chip in old Nintendo SNES consoles. This can't possibly be true, can it?
Four years ago I moved into a house whose previous occupant was reputedly a home cinema and hi-fi nut. He had taken his cool gear with him and left behind bundles of plastic-shielded copper spaghetti spewing out from skirting boards throughout the house. There is an especially vast and complicated explosion of Cthulhu-like tentacles emerging into the living room – snagging passers-by and entertaining our cat (the old one and the new one) – plus a kind of entwined spaghetti junction horror next to (but otherwise apparently having nothing to do with) the electricity cabinet.
Most of these copper cthulus have no plugs or ports, just sheath-clipped raw cable ends that must have been shoved or screwed into overpriced tat he picked up from our local branch of Les Sons Plus Riches. Or even Maplin's, I suppose. And just two cables are labelled to tell me what they’re for – and I can’t read his handwriting.
The electricians we invited to take a look assure me that no live current exists in any of the wires, which is odd considering that the box next to the fuse cabinet is always warm. They have steadfastly refused to indulge in a bit of "dem-bones" – this cable is connected to the… right speaker in bedroom 2, this cable is connected to the… left rear cinema tweeter in the lounge, etc. Oh tous écoutent la parole du Seigneur!
Until now, that is. Mme D asked the electrician at her workplace if he’d put us out of our Lovecraftesque misery and he will be casting spells to send these cables back to their own obscene dimension next week.
I can’t wait to see his face when he starts pulling. These cables are embedded deep into the walls. Not just in the plaster but behind the bricks, along with the usual lost spirit levels, witch dolls, mummified CAT-5s and a chained-up Fortunato (for the love of God!). He may tells us that the only way to rewire the house would be to knock it down.
Just imagine what the previous owner of the house is like at his workplace. He's probably rewired the office to feed microphones into the toilets and speakers into the stationery cupboard.
In the meantime I am wondering whether there might be a way of making some use of the idiot-wire threaded inside my walls to turn my house into a Faraday cage. Or once Charles – the last decent electrician alive – has finished retrieving all 67 miles of it, we might donate the copper to replace the village church roof.
Until then, I keep dreaming of wires.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He is secretly envious of colleagues who had the initiative to smart-up their smart homes themselves. This is the right way to go about it, after all. Trust no-one else to do it for you.
My house was the opposite it had a complete lack of electrical sockets, for example the living room runs from front to back and is 8 meters long had 2 single sockets in the whole room. It also had one fuse for the house….
The kitchen had a socket on one wall and the one for the cooker, and the bedrooms had one socket each…
I had the place rewired, with now 3 double sockets and 4 cat5 behind the tv and 3 more doubles in the living room, one bedroom got converted to an office and that has 10 double sockets and 10 cat5 outlets, and the other rooms got at least 2 double sockets each.
The garage got a load of sockets as did the shed as well.
Come on Mr Dabbs, get your act together. Why the fuck would you think 2 core cable ends up as coax?