I don't want to be wired for sound

A bloke from Sky knocked on my door the other day asking me if I’d like to part with eleventy billion pounds a month for the privilege of watching more rubbish on television.

Needless to say I turned him down. There are a couple of reasons for this: Firstly I had Sky a few years ago and it was rubbish. Out of the 66 million channels available only 3 or 4 are ever worth watching and you usually have to pay extra for those anyway. I already have 33 million useless channels courtesy of freeview and, as far as I can tell, Sky is just like Freeview. Without the free bit.

The other reason I don’t want Sky is because I don’t particularly want to add any more to the spaghetti junction behind my TV. The last time I ventured into that jungle was 2 years ago at Christmas when I hooked up the Wii. I went missing for a month.

So far I have wires for the TV itself, wires for the aerial, wires for the DVD player, wires for a separate NTSC Region 1 DVD player, wires that connect the DVD players to the TV, wires for the Wii and wires for the Wii remote chargers. There are about a thousand of the damn things that connect the surround sound system to various holes in the TV and 5 different speakers around the room. Then there are the dozens of leads lying around the plug socket for my iPhone charger and my girlfriend’s phone charger and the lead to the digital camera so that we can view our holiday snaps on the television.

It is the same problem with computers as well. There is the wire for the unit, the wire that connects the unit to the monitor, one that connects the phone line to the router, one that connects the router to the unit, one for the printer, one for the scanner, one for the mouse, one for the keyboard... you get the picture.

Of course there is wireless technology but even a wireless mouse needs a wire connecting the remote to the PC. It’s not really wireless is it? And have you tried using a wireless mouse and keyboard? They are great until the batteries die. They don’t give you any warning either. You will be busy typing away and suddenly letters just stop appearing on the screen. Not useful if, like me, you can’t touch type and you will have written several lines before you realise nothing is happening. The wireless mouse is even worse. The cursor will suddenly freeze on the page somewhere, meaning that you can’t do anything apart from leg it down the shops and buy some spare batteries. Or quickly pull the plug out before anyone comes in and sees the dodgy Thai ladyboy website you were browsing at the time.

For my business, I have a number of servers located in a secret nuclear bunker. I have never been there because the bloke who guards the place has very large hands and wears a rubber glove. And a ring. Still, I’ve been to server farms before and the amount of wires sticking out the back of each rack and lying all over the floor is mind-boggling. I’m convinced that the “power outages” that occasionally occur are as a result of an engineer tripping over a loose wire and pulling the plug out. The reason they often take so long to fix is no doubt because the engineer’s colleagues can’t find the poor wretch under the sea of wires and have to hack at the floor with machetes before they can locate the right plug out of the millions of random ones that are not connected to anything.

Seriously, the person who invented wires needs to be strangled. Preferably by a wire just for the sake of irony. They are so irritating. Not only that but they make the place look a mess. Seeing wires trailing round the edge of the skirting board is horrible. The mess behind my TV in the living room and behind the desk in my office is horrifying.

I don’t bother to even attempt tidying the wires up now or trying to make them look neater in some way. The last time I did that I spent hours bundling them all neatly with cable ties and wrapping some of them in gaffer tape and when I plugged it all in my DVD player didn’t work. I then had to unwrap it all to get to the one wire connecting my DVD player to the flux capacitor. I then had to buy a new DVD player altogether because, in my blind rage at having seen my afternoon’s hard work go down the toilet, I smashed the thing to pieces with my fist.

How do wires get so tangled up? It is like they have a mind of their own. Seriously, I will plug in a charger to power up my phone, making sure I keep it completely separate from all the other wires. When I return it has somehow tangled itself up with all the other wires and I have to unplug half of the electrical appliances in my house to get the wire back. A knot will also have somehow appeared halfway along it.

I use a laptop at home now. Not just because they take up less space and are generally more convenient but because there are fewer wires involved. With things like iPhones, iPADs, Kindles and all manner of wireless gadgets being released now my hope is that wires will become a thing of the past sooner rather than later. The technology is already there to do away with wires altogether but for some reason it’s not catching on fast enough. Perhaps they are just not reliable enough yet.

Of course the eco mentalists will have us believe that all this wireless technology is giving us brain cancer and killing all the bees. I think this is going to be an even bigger problem facing development of this kind of technology than solving the dilemma of batteries running out in wireless keyboards. Speaking of which, I better finish writing now before my keyboard runs out of ba