Brainstorm Magazine

Sometimes, a small irritation leads to a big realisation. Such as that you’ve been wasting your life.

I should have been in the plug adapter business. These people rake it in. They mass-produce little bits of cheap moulded plastic and metal, and sell them at prices that would suggest you get a free DVD player with each purchase.

A plug should be a simple device. It needs, at most, three metal conductors, for live, neutral and ground. How hard can a three-pin plug be to standardise?

But no. We also get two-pin plugs in a wild profusion of designs. Some are just flat with two pins, but even those require a special old-fashioned plug point that isn’t like the newfangled sockets designed to fit only the funny ones with the pointy ends, nor like the socket for the round ones with the little lips where the ground connector was supposed to go.

If you don’t need a ground pin because the device won’t kill you if it shorts, it’s not like you can just use the live and neutral holes in a three-pin socket. No, that’d be far too simple. You need an adapter.

I have five two-pin sockets next to my bed, but I cannot at the same time plug in my phone, my clock-radio, my bedside lamp and my shaver. One of the five sockets is blocked by another adapter, and the plugs on the phone and shaver simply won’t fit alongside the others. So with five sockets, I can connect three devices.

To get all four connected, I need a veritable fire hazard of adapters all plugged into each other like the frustrated outburst of an insane Lego artist. At least I can get lulled to sleep by the sound of gentle sparking.

Whatever made anyone think that a plug is a good place to house a bulky transformer? I’ve seen perfectly good designs for tough, rubberised, cylindrical transformers that just sit along the wire somewhere, out of the way of your adapter stack.

But no, they have to be in the plug, and each one has to be oriented and moulded in a innovatively impractical and uniquely irritating way. And don’t get me started on those cheap plastic extension boxes. You can get an entire rotary stick combination chopper/ blender gizmo for the price they charge for them! (Though you couldn’t plug it in.)

These extension boxes appear to let you connect five appliances. Not so. Plug in a two-pin cord, and suddenly two of your three-pin points are blocked by the plug. If it’s not just a kettle with a regular plug, or you’re not comfortable re-shaping your transformer plugs with a Dremel, you lose even more sockets.

I bought a camera online. Nice camera. Cheap, too. But I can’t use it. Although I have an adapter that allows me to plug my South African two-pin gadgets into American or European sockets, this requires the opposite adapter. As it happens, I have one of those too. But this plug doesn’t quite fit. So now I need yet another adapter that is almost but not quite like the one I already have, and certainly won’t fit next to it in the jumble that balances precariously on my five-point extension box. Try explaining all this to the superstore assistant.

I strongly suspect I have more invested in extensions and plug adapters than in electrical appliances. You and I, my friend, are in the wrong business.

Ivo Vegter is a freelance writer and columnist. Follow him @ivovegter on Twitter.