At work, I have an office so no one else uses my phone. When it rings, I answer it with my left hand, and when I’m done talking, I put it back the same way. Yet, every couple of weeks, I notice that it’s tangled up again and I have to detach the cord and untangle it. It’s weird, because I never twist the phone at all. It gets removed and placed back down the same way every time.
It happened all the time with my phone, too. I could only conclude that I was inadvertently adding a twist every time, without realizing it.
the good news is that, regardless of how it happens, you can get rid of it without the bother of undoiong your phone connection every time. (I myself liked to dangle the receiver without disconnecting it, just to watch it spin, but that’s just me.) —
Get yourself a rotatable phone connection. You can buy these at phone stores and office supply stores. It allows the wire to rotate freely, so kinks never develop. After i put one on my phone, I never had to worry about it.
What I really wanna know is how my daughter can manage to kink and knot her Slinky, in a way that suggests that she’s been rotating it through the fourth dimension. It takes a least half an hour to undo it.
Cal, it’s not really a lot of effort for me to detach the plug and untangle it. But I still want to find out why it happens. A couple of weeks ago, I started consciously monitoring the way I pick the phone up and then place it back. There should be no way that it gets tangled.
(Assuming right-handedness) you pick up the phone with your left hand, dial with the right. Soon after, you switch it across. You replace it with the right hand - it’s been turned through 360 degrees.
You don’t have to replace the phone with your right hand to twist it. The natural way to pass the phone between hands as you take a call is by keeping the receiver ‘facing’ you. If you kept passing between hands this way each 180 degree twist as you change hands would be negated by a -180 degree as you pass it back.
However, if you pass it back to your left as you hang up, the natural thing to do is to twist the receiver away from you, in preparation to placing it face down. Rather than being a -180 degree twist this is another 180 in the same direction. Thus your call has produced a 360 degree twist.
If you were really smart (or pointlessly anal with nothing better to do :)) you could use the twists to keep count of the number of calls you’ve taken.
I’m trying this for real, and I can’t work out what you’re describing. My description of ‘up with left - pass to right - replace’ does cause a 360 twist, precisely because when it’s passed from the left hand to the right, it’s with the receiver facing the face (arf) at all times.
Similarly when you switch from one ear to the other the handset goes through a 180 rotation. If you don’t pay attention, when you switch it back you could be completing the entire 360-degrees.
In a related vein, probably not worth its own thread, what causes kinkage–you know, when the direction of the coil gets reversed? And why are kinks so hard to get out?
arf?
UOTE=Futile Gesture]You don’t have to replace the phone with your right hand to twist it. The natural way to pass the phone between hands as you take a call is by keeping the receiver ‘facing’ you. If you kept passing between hands this way each 180 degree twist as you change hands would be negated by a -180 degree as you pass it back.
However, if you pass it back to your left as you hang up, the natural thing to do is to twist the receiver away from you, in preparation to placing it face down. Rather than being a -180 degree twist this is another 180 in the same direction. Thus your call has produced a 360 degree twist.
If you were really smart (or pointlessly anal with nothing better to do :)) you could use the twists to keep count of the number of calls you’ve taken.
[/QUOTE]
It could be the cleaning people. They may be switching the cord around when they clean the mouthpiece of your phone. A friend who worked at Bank of California (years ago) showed me how it was standard practice for the night cleaning crew to put the phone back in the cradle in reverse position, so you’d know they cleaned your phone when you came to work in the AM.
Thinking about it, at work, I do pick up the phone with my right hand (being right handed) but often transfer it to my left hand when I need to scribble something down, so it gets twisted.
But the kinks, I’m not so sure about. There’s a way to twist them out without having to move the kink all the way up the phone line to the end. Just can’t remember it or how to create a kink to try and experiment 