Married to a Gearhead

Every marriage has its secrets. I found ours in a spare closet, and it attacked me.

Those of you who aren't married to a technophile have no idea of what it's like. High tech gadgetry is in abundance at our house, and the constant influx has me worried about storage space.

The other day I went to a spare closet to look for some acrylic paint, and upon opening the closet door, was attacked by yards of falling wires. I felt like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, fighting off that giant spider. When I subdued the wires, cables, and powerstrips, I looked in the big cardboard box that had seemingly birthed them. It was like an archeological discovery of Modern Marital History.

There, in the corner of the box, sits a forlorn cell phone that had once been at the forefront of modern technology. In the other corner, an intergenerational family of Palm Pilots huddles together for safety. Three (yes, three; I kid you not) battery rechargers lay prone at the bottom of the box, next to last year's Blackberry. I saw the portable DVD player that turned out to be, well, not so portable. And look, there's that digital camera watch that had once been so imperative to buy, that it was worth sneaking out while supposedly getting me the Sunday paper! ...I wondered what happened to that little guy, and there he was, curled needfully around a USB port that rested atop an inkjet printer. An early-model MP3 player looked somewhat hopeful, as though there wasn't a video iPod legally uploading last season's episodes of "The Office" even as I gaped at the innards of the Cardboard Box of Shame.

I grabbed the Canon EOS-1D, circa 2001, and marched righteously to where my husband lay, innocently playing Pac-man on his relatively new laptop PC. I held it aloft, ready to state my complaint. Without looking up, or pausing the game, he said "By the way, this weekend I need to get a USB port adapter/converter. It'll just a take a minute, and it will be just what we need to make our lives easier."

USB port adapter/converter. USB port...yeah, I guess we don't have one of those.