My last job involved 24 hr crews which shared desks. Every day my phone cord was so twisted up I could hardly anwswer the phone (depending on who sat there on the last 2 shifts). I’m talking seriously tangled. There is no way it involved a single twist with each phone call. There were simply too many rotations. Every day I would slowly untangle the mess so it again it was a single loop of coiled wire.
I often wondered if the person answered the phone while spinning in the chair. I admit there were day’s I fantasized about strangling the person with the cord and until promises were made. That and throwing open containers of liquid into the trash (coffee, sodas). Same fantasy.
I have my own desk now so I don’t have to put up with it anymore.
Take a pass on the phone cord unravelling doo-dads. They work okay, but they’re mechanically weak. One accidental bump onto a hard surface and they snap right off. The phone dangling trick always works for me.
I don’t dangle the handset. What I do is I unplug the handset cord from either the handset or the base unit, stretch it, then let it hang freely. The cord goes back to its unstressed stable state – which yes, with the passing of time will no longer be “like new” because the materials will lose elasticity – and I don’t risk banging the handset on the floor. Then I plug it back in.
My phone cord is always tangled up - I regularly have to call tech support to get new cords. The phone tech also explained that it’s the switching from hand to hand (of the handset) - or ear to ear - that causes it to get tangled up. The last time, it was so bad that my phone calls were being disconnected because of it. This time they gave me a short cord. Heh, guess that might work since there’s less cord to get tangled?
I went to the sale of items in the Marlene Dietrich estate in Beverly Hills shortly after her death - they were selling everything and what caught my eye were two of those godawful, standard AT&T, beige wall phones - and each had an extension cord that was about twenty feet long that were tangled and stretched out beyond repair.
I remembered thinking, “did nobody ever tell Marlene there were such things as cordless phones?”