My coworkers are all out so I went under all their desks with zip ties and wire holders and a vengeance and cleaned up their wires. I swear, they deliberately cross the wires back and forth, just to mess with me!
But now it all looks nice and neat and I am happy.
Back in my high school days, when men were men and ethernet jacks were nervous, I had a summer job helping my school’s sysadmin set up new computer labs. As orientation for the job, he showed me several of the school’s networking closets. The largest of them was … nightmarish.
Set aside the fact that the cables were tangled like mad, with no labels to be seen. Never mind that the gear itself ranged from sleek rackmounted routers to old 10BaseT ethernet hubs. Tune out the whine of fans running themselves to exhaustion in a sealed closet in the middle of a New Hampshire summer.
This closet, you see, was on the top floor of the building. And the ceiling leaked. Not water. It leaked tar, from the roof. Tar that had dripped down over everything. Cables long tangled were now thoroughly englommed. Display LEDs were covered. And so on.
None of this, BTW, was this sysadmin’s fault - the previous fellow had been less than entirely dilligent, and I believe the system was greatly improved by the time I graduated. But still - whenever anyone complains of a spaghetti tangle, I just laugh, because I know it could be so much worse.
BTW - good on you, Anaamika. I really do believe that neatly ordered cables are the first step to keeping systems readily maintainable. In fact, they help prevent service calls - you know, the sort where naive users lose track of which cable goes where, try to replace a mouse or printer with a new one, and can’t figure out why their keyboard stopped working.
Is the neatness of other people’s wiring a professional responsibility of yours or a psychological matter? 
Why would wires under someone else’s desk bother you?
Just wondering.
Zip ties? :dubious:
Velcro straps or twist wire are much better, if you want to replace a peripheral that has its cable bundled up with zip ties it’s a chore, and you can damage the other cables when cutting the tie.
I didn’t have anything else, so I just kept the zip ties a little bit loose. And technically it is not my problem…except that when something goes wrong, that is my problem, so it’s really maintenance to save me effort later on.
Most of the people in my office are rather “naive users”. 
bundling and routing for looks can be very different than for function.
I once zip tied a friends belt loop to his chair when he feel asleep. When he woke up and had to pee, he ended up ripping the belt loop off and racing to the mens’ room.
Not often the case in the real world, though. If something looks like a tangled mess to use and maintain, it almost certainly is. And if a setup looks clean, efficient, and well-ordered, maintaining it is almost certainly going to be a lot simpler.
The person that is the worst always has problems, too. I mean, we’re in a poor office and have lots of hand-me-down equipment and no hope of getting anymore. I prefer to keep it at least nice and neat, that way you know what’s going on.
I took over a network from a fella that loved zip ties.
All 50 workstations: All cables from tower to desk zip-tied together every six inches so that you had one massive bundle with keyboard, mouse, speaker signal, speaker power, VGA, and monitor power, from the back of the PC to the back of the desk, with every inch of slack for each wire individually bundled up into little staggered carbuncles.
I can admit, if you happened to crawl under the desk, it looked very tidy under there. You might let out a little “ooh” of admiration for the obsessive orderliness of it, before you settled down for twenty minutes of cursing because you needed to swap out a keyboard. User wants to move something three inches to the left? Nuh-uh.
My boss at a former job had a zip-tie obsession, and a zip-tie gun with which to indulge it. He didn’t meddle with our actual desks, but we couldn’t keep him out of the lab. We’d spend a morning routing or rerouting cables in the lab, take a break for lunch, and come back to find that he’d gone through and bundled up the cables we were working with and zip-tied them to the racks. Fifteen minutes later, we’d have enough ties cut away and the cables sorted back out so we could continue working.
We’d gripe about it, he’d apologize, and a week later he’d do it again–even though we got in the habit of telling him, “We’re running new cables in the lab today. Don’t zip-tie them.” He apparently couldn’t help himself.
Oh, I only used one zip tie, and I didn’t zip tie the keyboard or mouse wires, which need the most slack and are the ones most changed, anyway. I zip tied the power cords, the line to the speakers, and the internet cords, and any other mysterious wires down there.
Sort of kind of tangentially related:
I can’t do anything about the wires at work, but I have nearly banished them from my home. I used to have speakers, a printer, and a scanner connected to my laptop: I replaced the printer and scanner with a wireless all-in-one, and I decided that I could live without external speakers. And I’ve had a Bluetooth mouse/keyboard combo for ages. So now there are zero wires connected to my laptop (except the power cord, when needed), and I love it. I’ve had this setup for almost a year and I still get happy about how neat my desk is these days.