In mere days – days! – I’ll be sitting on a carpeted living room floor, surrounded by a dizzying kaleidoscope of torn wrapping paper and flung bows, one of which will invariably be stuck atop the head of a confused housecat. Buried beneath this festive camouflage will lie boxes filled with Christmas gifts, and although Santa usually plays his cards close to the chest, at least one of these gifts is bound to be an electronic device of some kind – something that plugs into a wall and probably makes a whirring sound.
Being a man (sort of), I’m genetically programmed to like these things; buried in the male DNA are instructions to drool over shiny things that power to life by flicking, turning, or pressing something. That’s why guys tend to drool over stuff like electric drills and televisions, much the way a puma will drool in sight of a picked-over deer carcass. These analogies may get more disgusting as we go along.
Even though I love loving this crap, these flashy gizmos with their lights and loud noises, what accompanies them is pure evil: The necessary, yet troublesome, scourge of wires. Tangly, knotted, mind-of-their-own electrical wires. They’re the most insidious plague to befall humankind since the mullet.
I keep a junk drawer in the kitchen, right? Just about everyone has one of these; you never know when something around the house will break, and you’ll need to scrounge parts from the old portable cassette player you used in 1986. When I first crammed said drawer with heaps of misfit detritus, I tried to be organized about it. I placed the items in carefully – cell phone charger, can opener, an ancient Game Boy from another life – and coiled the corresponding wires into tight curlicues so pristine they could have passed as modern conceptual art. Like those confusing exhibits you see in which someone places a Burger King wrapper next to a dirty diaper, and claims it’s an exploration of the human soul vis a vis the digestive system.
Such attention with which these items were stored. Such care. Such delicate placement. And what happens when I open the drawer to retrieve a set of AA batteries? It looks like the contents were shelled with heavy artillery. Like the rubber bands flew a tiny plane over my electronic Hiroshima and dropped a big fat A-bomb.
It’s not just that the wires fall slack with time. Logic would dictate that, even if the coils were to gradually loosen, they would still maintain some semblance of their basic shape, and stay segregated. But no. They’re tangled, twisted, knotted like shoelaces, wrapped up in a bizarre lover’s embrace that can only be undone with time and patience and a crack team of NASA engineers. It takes no effort at all to store these items, but the delicacy of a seasoned heart surgeon to restore them to order.
Only after long, stressful minutes of untangling am I able to recover enough sanity to ask the obvious question: How does this happen?
At first, it seems physically impossible – a mathematical enigma that would blow Stephen Hawkins’ glasses straight off his face. When asked about it, most people invoke theories that conjure the work of mythical creatures, like elves or gnomes. Any rational person would discredit the existence of these fictional beings, hallucinations of Tolkien and Suess and the self-proclaimed Lizard King who lives in the Dumpster near my house. But when you’re dealing with an issue so stupefyingly mysterious, you suspend your disbelief.
It’s easy to see how the scene would unfold: Elf Team Six, comprised of tiny men the size of peach pits, assembles on your kitchen table, having snuck in through the pet door. Buford, the elf with the hairlip and the uncontrollable flaulence, fires his grappling hook toward the uppermost drawer closest to your sink; one end hooks around the brass handle, and other is fastened to the centerpiece that holds the wax candles scented like cougar butts. The elves shimmy their way across this makeshift tightrope, nudge the drawer open, and pounce headfirst into this wire-rich eden. Then they tangle everything, light up cigars, raid your fridge and eat all your cheese.
Bastards! Infidels! Stupid jerks!
But wait. Turns out there’s a scientific, elfless explanation.
See, scientists are nerds, and some of these nerds have developed something they call knot theory. This is real. The math is complex, but according to Cracked – a website dedicated to explaining weird crap – the gist is this: Most of these wires are round in circumference. This means they lack aerodymanics and friction control. Since there are many more configurations in which wires can be tangled than untangled, the laws of physics dictate that a tangled arrangement is much more likely, statistically. So whenever there’s movement – jostling, rumbling, opening and closing – the wires move, unfettered by friction, and seek out one of these more probable tangled arranegements. This is called action-reaction motion physics. That’s why, when a college student tosses her headphones into a backpack and walks across campus to basket weaving class, she pulls them out to find the wires twisted into the kind of knots that could tie a sail to a clipper ship.
Physics! It’s a gas.
With the proliferation of wireless devices, this stands to become less of an issue. But as long as gadgets need to be charged, we won’t purge the world of wires completely – meaning junk drawers like mine will continue to be havens for disarray, confusion, and anarchy.
So when I rip the wrapping paper from my long-awaited Christmas loot, I just might squeal with delight if one of those gifts happens to be tube socks.
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