Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Having a large family can be a joy. The house is always full of life — children yell from the moment they wake up until it’s time to go to sleep unless they’re teenagers, in which case they don’t rise before dusk and speak only if required. Siblings develop their own language and rhythms and then use such things to attempt to skirt rules and thwart parents’ authority in every conceivable way. You also get a ton of perspectives on the same things, and we always have enough players to make all board games feel like a maxed-out experience. And don’t get me started on UNO, the card game built for large families and large family arguments and debates. Plus, there is NOTHING like hitting one kid with a draw-four after draw-four and watching the sheer delight in the rest of the players who have no choice but to still love one another at the end of the game. Seriously, big families are a joy.
There’s the other side of that joy, which is the frustration of being part of a big family that is technologically up-to-date. Every person in my family has at least one device. My daughter, the oldest child, has two — an iPhone and an iPad. That means we have three phones and four iPads. We’re an Apple house ’round Jackson HQ, which means that all of our chargers work for all of our devices.
Let me tell you a little bit about me. I don’t lose things. I don’t lose keys. I don’t lose chargers. I don’t lose — I’m a winner. When I open a box for a new or an upgraded device, I make sure the charger and the device stick together (for as long as possible). I’m slightly OCD in that way. Perhaps it’s a residual vestige from slavery where I don’t like to separate things that came in the same package. I also realize how ridiculous that sounds, but alas, this is my truth. If I lived by myself, I would never ever have any problems with devices and chargers.
Lifestyle
Now let me tell you a little bit about the other five members of my family — they don’t give a single solitary … flip … about ensuring that chargers don’t get lost or even keeping chargers with the devices they came with. They also don’t care about MY desire to keep all of our chargers and ensure that our family can wake up, as a whole, every day with fully charged devices. I know this because my wife and kids will lose their chargers (or forget them somewhere; I have no idea how) and then take mine, and then lose those. And then when I go buy new chargers — which are unnecessarily expensive, mind you — they take those and lose them.
As an example, currently, as of this writing, my HOUSEHOLD has TWO chargers. Remember, there are AT LEAST seven devices in this house, which means we should have seven chargers, and really we should have ten since I’ve upgraded three devices in the past year. And yet, we’re down to TWO and neither of those are the actual chargers that came with the iPhone or iPad. No, the two that we currently have are aftermarket charging blocks and cords that I ordered online, which do not do as good a job as the products directly from Apple. Le sigh. I have ordered more cords. I expect they will all disappear and be gone within a week’s time. I’m not a betting man but I would bet the house on that being the case. That’s just how chargers go in this house.
I hear you looking at me … Panama, what have YOU done to stop this? Well, I’ve tried to institute a check-out system like my house is a library of device chargers. That didn’t work. I tried to threaten everybody that if the chargers all turned into Black history, no new chargers would enter the house. That lasted for a day until I realized that if folks can’t charge things then everybody loses their mind. I considered taping the chargers into a surge protector but that seems extreme and what if I need to move them from place to place for some reason? As you can see, there are no optimal solutions. Especially since I truly can’t understand WHY we keep losing them. Like, how does a person leave the house with chargers and return with a phone that isn’t charged AND no charger?
I know my family isn’t the only one dealing with this epidemic. The worst part of it? When I ask who took MY chargers — the ones I use every night to charge all of the kids’ iPads — not a single person knows. Nobody has any idea who took them but nobody in my house took the chargers … from my house. At the same time, everybody is adamant that we do not have ghosts. I also seem to be the only person disturbed by a lack of charging apparatuses. Funny how that happens, I am trying to help everybody else out and I’m the only one frustrated.
Make it make sense. Ah, the joys of a large family.
Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio and host of the award-winning podcast, “Dear Culture” on theGrio Black Podcast Network. He writes very Black things, drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest) but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said “Unknown” (Blackest).
