"It’s Not Personal, Sonny. It’s Just Business" – – the Godfather

I love being techie, I swear I do, but sometimes…..

Can somebody tell me why we need all these chargers??  Just for the sake of you, my loyal readers, I went through my house and counted the number of chargers we have for our various gadgets and gizmos.  Would you believe we have 17 different chargers for a family of four???!!!  Please explain why in a civilization that can cram 120 MB of pictures on an SD card the size of a postage stamp, and can make a pompous, muscle-shirt-sporting Brit the go-to guy for American music critique, we can’t come up with a way to charge our devices without all these different attachments! 

Tonight, R-T needed to use the digital camcorder for a class project, and guess what was missing?  Now, I fairly easily located the other 16 chargers in our house, even without a divining rod, but that elusive 17th – – not anywhere to be found.  I checked every outlet, every drawer, every sneaky place a charger might try to hide.  (It being Earth Day yesterday and all, I thought maybe it was just doing its part)  But nothing. 

So it occurred to me that of the 16 remaining chargers, at least one of them would have to be compatible with the poor, charger-less camcorder.  Can you say “CONSPIRACY”??  Yes, my friends.  We have been hornswaggled by the electronic mafia.  Every gadget charger in the world has been deviously designed to be 1/100th of a millimeter different than every other charger.  I know this because I tried every one of them.  I tried so many male-to-female and female-to-male connections that I almost got a bit turned on.  But not one of them would work in the camcorder. And when I tried to force a couple that were pretty close, they made some sparking sounds that I’m pretty sure weren’t because of a romantic chemistry between them.

Does that mean that the conspirators win, then?  If my charger is missing, then I can’t use my camcorder.  So either I have to order another charger from the company, or buy a completely new device, right?  What other evidence do we need that we have become a totalitarian marketplace?  The gadget gurus have made us dependent upon their contrivances so that we can’t even remember our dentist appointments or find our chiropractor’s phone numbers without them.  And once this dependency is established, they laugh at our naive willingness to buy their stupid chargers to keep them running.  And then they laugh harder when we misplace said chargers.  Fascists.

I’ve decided to have my boys spend the rest of this homeschool year researching how chargers work.  We are going to study, experiment, and test every possible theory until we have figured out how to create a universal charger.  One single device that will accept every electronic connection.  The plugged-in world as we know it, will be a thing of the past.   If you don’t hear from us, you will know that our plans have become uncovered, and that we have become a casualty of the Charger Conspiracy.  In the event that we do meet our demise at the bottom of Lake Michigan with a mainframe strapped to our ankles, I hereby will all of my electronic devices and their respective chargers to my  dear friends and family.  My camcorder, I will to my Aunt Fran, who never forgets to point out that I’ve put on a few extra pounds since she saw me last.  God bless us, every one.