Why are there never free power sockets when my Y-fronts need charging?

Fondling my crotch? No, I’m phoning my mother

Photo © 2025 Ajin K S

“No, it’s not going in. It’s a couple of inches too short.”

Here we go again. I get this complaint all the time. Recharging cables, eh? Never long enough to reach the socket.

Why, what did you think I was talking about?

As you, my faithful reader, will be aware, it is a strict ISO requirement that power cables for electronic devices be manufactured in one of two lengths:

• exactly 25.4mm shorter than required

• two metres longer than necessary

Seasoned road warriors like us – that is, mobile users boosted with a pinch of salt and a twist of black pepper – will have opted for the latter. Better to have cables that are too long than too short, right?

There are disadvantages, of course. Walking around with long cables for all our devices means we have to cram even more bulk into our Wengers, the contents of which explode spectacularly across the room like a party popper as soon as you pull open a zip. And having hooked up your laptop to the mains socket at your feet, the surplus coils of springy cable begin to animate creepily in slow motion, gradually snaking their way around the tabletop in order to sprawl provocatively across a corner of the keyboard or give you a fright by suddenly flopping in front of the display.

Everyone else in the world, however, seems to limp along with a cable – that is, if they remember to bring one at all – that’s just a little bit too short and won’t quite reach.

And so it is at today’s team-building conference. There will be presentations. There will be training. There will be blood.

These on-site huddle-days follow a pattern. A customer requests a group session to take place at their premises, a needs analysis is drawn up, a training outline agreed upon, a generously proportioned meeting room duly booked and, on the day, the participants file in with their laptops.

They duly fight over the coffee and tea dispensers, polish off the decent cookies (avoiding those weird coconut biscuits that leave you picking between your teeth until lunchtime) and settle down at the ugly and uneven grey tables that have been pushed roughly together to produce a cynical mockery of a boardroom arrangement for their software education.

An hour and a half later, the first howl rings out across the Formica savanna.

“I’m down to 6 per cent. Does anyone have a charger I can borrow?”