My parents were not hoarders, but they did grow up in the Great Depression, so throwing away perfectly good items was considered just shy of a mortal sin in their eyes. Unfortunately for my wife, I have inherited this mindset. That's why I have a small assortment (read: several bins) of electronics and associated cables in my office closet. I could probably be forgiven if that was the extent of my gear and cable collection. But let's head out to the garage, shall we?
We haven't had a home phone for some time, but I kept a corded phone in a bin out there, just in case. And a wireless phone system, just in case, too. Maybe you can attribute that to paranoia, but when you see the tackle box reallocated for cables, a cardboard box designed to hold reams of copy paper filled with more cables, a multi-drawer plastic storage cabinet designed to hold nuts and bolts packed with more cables, and more cables piled on the previously mentioned items holding other cables, you begin to see the problem.
During the last Black Friday consumer spending frenzy, I treated myself to a new workbench for the garage. My previous model was a cheap, metal thing I bought more as a placeholder than a permanent option. More than 20 years later, the placeholder was still there, but its front door wouldn't stay closed and the work surface was no longer stable. However, the new workbench has a different drawer layout, so my stash of cables had to be reduced so they would fit.
Turns out I had enough coax to wire up a TV in every room in the house and then some. There was also an abundance of phone cables and plenty of Cat 5, too. There's less of all of these now, but still a decent supply.
I kept the XLR and HDMI cables, as well as an S-VHS cable (for sentimental reasons, I suppose), optical audio cables, some speaker wire, and a spare power cable or two. There's also a few spare composite cables and RCA cables, so if VHS or even DVD come back into fashion like vinyl, I'm all set.
Then came the sticky cables. Those were an easy toss, same as the ones with corroded connectors. I also found the spare power cable for my Xbox 360, a gaming system I traded in maybe a decade ago. Plus, I found cables and accessories for TiVo, a platform I abandoned years ago, as well as cables I could not identify. I even found a pair of BBQ tongs among the collection. I really wish that was a joke.
Why do I feel secure in sharing the embarrassing details of my recent purge? It's because I know there are many of you out there dismissing my cable crisis with a backhanded wave and a half-hearted razzberry. "You think that's a lot of cables," you're thinking, "we have a whole [shelving unit, closet, office, loft, fill-in-the-blank] filled with cables."
So, here's my question: Why?
Peace of mind is important, particularly when your job revolves around live production or presentations. Beyond the cables you likely keep in your portable bag of tricks for diagnostics and quick fixes, how redundant does your spare cable stash need to be? Is there a place for every cable, and is every cable in its place? Are there outdated cables that, even if everything goes wrong, will never get put back into service? (Speaking of service, you should probably check and see if all those cables still work. )
Clearly, I'm not the guy telling you to eliminate your unused cable inventory. I still have a healthy (and redundant) personal stockpile. Odds are I won't ever need most of them, but I might need some of them. With my recent reorganization, I also know it'll be easy to access them if that time comes. To me, that's worth a drawer in my workbench. How much storage space is it worth to you?
