I almost threw out all my old USB cables. This week proved why I never should
Somewhere between chaos and genius lies a drawer full of old tech cables I won’t throw away. I regret nothing
A few weeks back, people on Bluesky started bragging about throwing out cables. I would have penned a column about this at the time, but, frankly, I needed to recover from the shock. Because it turns out there are two types of people in this world: monsters who throw away cables, and sensible folks who – obviously entirely correctly – believe that you absolutely need to have a house full of cables, because you never quite know when you’re going to need one of them at some random point in the future.
It was Tom Berry who first spiked my anxiety. He describes himself as a record collector. But he’s apparently not a cable collector, because he said: “Have just thrown out a big box of cables ‘that might come in useful one day’.” Those scare quotes made my teeth itch. However, this flagrantly reckless missive might have vanished into the ether had author, political journalist and human expletive generator Ian Dunt not waded in: “Sound. Look at the space your old just-in-case cables use up. Imagine how much you would pay for that extra storage in your flat. Check the price of buying a cable. Then get rid of them.”
Every fibre of my being reeled. My brain screamed. My soul howled. Just… no. Because what if you do need one of those cables? You’ll be all smug with your ‘extra space’ and ‘drawers no longer stuffed full of cables’. But where will that leave you when you go to plug in a prized gadget and realise instead of a USB-C port, it’s got some weird triangular thing staring back at you with a mischievous grin? On Amazon, that’s where. Feeling dirty about feeding the Bezos machine and taking that 30-day trial of Prime just to get the thing delivered by tomorrow.
Totally wired
“Come on”, you might say. “Isn’t this a bit… over the top? Surely you don’t collect and keep every cable you’ve ever owned?” Well, no. Even I don’t fancy living in rooms packed with black, rubbery spaghetti and semi-random connectors. Even I have my limits. Also, I did on more than one occasional almost throw out all my old cables. But as the USB-C revolution trundled on, I instead decided to ‘prune’ cables and adapters I owned. So I still retain a selection of every cable type, because, well, you really never do know.
And this past week, I went into smug mode. Our heating system decided to shun one of our radiators. It’s a Tado v3, which cunningly ignores modern connectivity by having a ‘star’ network. In other words, a gadget plugs into the router, and from there broadcasts to devices on each radiator, telling them what to do. Which doesn’t work when there’s a steel in the way. Helpfully, Tado also only supplied a cable approximately half a nanometer long, and so I needed a much longer one to re-site the broadcasting unit. I was then duly surprised because the supplied cable was micro-USB.
Had I been a cable-chucker – a Berry or a Dunt – I’d have had to suffer the indignity of buying a new cable, waiting for it to arrive, and remembering I’d casually tossed a bunch of perfectly usable ones for no good reason. Instead: vindication! I reached into the drawer of dreams, grabbed what I needed, and fixed the problem in seconds.
Granted, this doesn’t happen every day. And, sure, Berry and Dunt might… have a point if you lack storage space or hang on to literally every cable and adapter you’ve acquired since 1977, even when devices they power have long since died. But I’m absolutely not going to admit it, because what if years from now another device needs a cable I refused to get rid of? I’d feel pretty stupid if I’d just thrown it away.
Craig Grannell
Contributor 
