What's in the cable pouch, six months later

I was looking for the white cable, the one that charges the phone. I found it after two minutes, under everything else, and kept emptying the pouch anyway because it was faster than zipping it back up.

The desk in my room, in Batumi, one afternoon in June. Eleven cables. Two adapters. A USB stick whose contents I don’t know. A memory card reader. Two wall chargers. A mouse. An office rubber band that’s been holding a coil together for four years and has survived a flight, four countries, and one replaced laptop.

This isn’t a travel organizer with elastic compartments. It’s a zippered canvas pencil case, the kind kids use, that I never chose and can no longer place the origin of. I wrote a piece back in April about soft organizers, with one model kept and three ruled out. I still haven’t bought one. That’s consistent with how this site works, and it’s still a little embarrassing.

Why this pouch never gets sorted

I’ve packed my bag every two weeks for six months. I’ve taken out a book in Marrakech, a pair of shoes in Bangkok, two T-shirts along the way. Each time, the decision gets triggered the same way: the object is too big, too heavy, or it’s taking up space I want to give to something else.

A cable triggers nothing. It weighs about as much as a handful of coins, it folds, it slides into a gap, and it never competes with anything for space. The threshold above which I start asking whether an object deserves its spot sits somewhere above the entire pouch, and well above any of its individual contents.

The buildup isn’t a lack of discipline. Sorting out bulky items is an automatic mechanism, and below a certain size, there’s no mechanism left at all.

What was already there in January

Four objects made it through the flight, the strait crossing, the spring heat, and two months in Asia.

The coil of cables held together by the office rubber band: the white phone cable, a braided fabric cable bought in Portugal, and two micro-USB cables. One of the two still gets used, it charges the clip-on speaker. The other hasn’t served any purpose in at least two years, and I couldn’t tell you which device it used to power.

The cheap phone charger bought in Lisbon two weeks before the flight. Still there, still in service, it’s the one that charges the phone every night. I published a piece in June about gallium nitride chargers. I haven’t bought one of those either, and the reader who finds that contradictory is right on the substance and wrong on the method: what I write over there is what I would buy, not what I’ve bought. That distinction holds up the whole site and it’s laid out in how I choose.

The plug adapter I’ve been hauling around out of superstition for four years. It got used for the first time in April, in a room in Chiang Mai. Once in four years, which proves the superstition right and every calculation I could have made about it wrong.

The mouse, which I’ll get to below because it deserves its own section.

What climbed aboard along the way

Three objects, three one-off reasons, no actual decision.

A USB-C to USB-C cable bought in Chiang Mai, in April, because the previous one had gone sticky. The length printed on the packaging, which I kept for two days before throwing it out, said one meter. I never checked it against a ruler, and I don’t own one.

A USB-C to USB-A adapter, bought in Taipei in May to plug in a drive a guy in the next room wanted to hand me. The transfer took four minutes. The adapter stayed for six weeks.

A memory card reader, and that one I didn’t even buy. It was sitting in a drawer in a room in Hanoi, next to a charger and a sock, and I took it. I don’t own a single device that uses a memory card. I took it anyway, and if you want to understand how a pouch grows, that sentence says it all.

What never got used

The second micro-USB cable. The USB stick, which probably holds a 2019 presentation and hasn’t been plugged in for long enough that I no longer know what’s on it. The card reader. The Taipei adapter, since the day I bought it.

Four objects out of nineteen, and none of the four ever came close to leaving the bag, because leaving the bag requires you to think about it, and you only think about it when it becomes a nuisance.

That leaves five black cables that all look roughly the same, in different lengths, and I couldn’t tell you which one came from where. I don’t count them among the useless ones, since I don’t know what they plug into. I don’t count them among the useful ones either, for the same reason.

What melted

The laptop’s original USB-C cable, left for two hours on a windowsill in Marrakech, in March, while I worked on the other side of the room. The sheath changed texture. It turned sticky and stayed that way, which turns a cable into a dust magnet and an object you’d rather not touch.

It still works. It’s in the pouch. I kept it in that state for six weeks before buying another one, and I only threw the sticky one out while writing this piece, which makes it the one object all day whose fate was decided by the writing of an article.

The mouse, and what happens when you finally look

There’s a small wireless mouse in this pouch, with a receiver tucked into a slot under the lid. It’s the third unit of the same model. I’ve already written here that I kept rebuying it without ever looking at what else was out there, and I’ve also written that I should be embarrassed by that sentence.

Six months later, I looked. An hour spent on product listings, which is little for an entire category and a lot for an object at this price point.

What I found comes down to one observation. Most travel mice I looked at are rechargeable, and it’s sold as an improvement. On a desk mouse, it probably is. In a cable pouch, a rechargeable mouse is one more cable, one more charge to keep track of, and an object that can die in the middle of an afternoon of work in a café where the outlet is taken. Mine runs on a battery that lasts for months, and I’m only noticing that now that I’m counting cables.

Only one of the candidates I looked at doesn’t advertise any charging in its listing. That’s the one I settled on, at the top of this page, and I’m settling on it for that one criterion alone, which also happens to be the only one I can verify without having the object in hand.

Rebuying the same model was, then, a good instinct. It was a good instinct by accident. Across three units I never knew why I was right, which is no better than being wrong, and I’m noting that here instead of congratulating myself for it.

A word on the third entry above, because the reasoning can sound like a pun. The only kind of storage that actually sorts anything is the kind that refuses something, and a pouch that counts its layers as a selling point is announcing in advance that it won’t refuse anything at all.

I threw three objects in the room’s trash bin that evening: the sticky cable, the second micro-USB cable, and the memory card reader. The next morning, before heading downstairs, I fished the card reader back out of the trash and put it back in the pouch. It’s still there. I have no explanation to offer, and I don’t feel like inventing one.