Connection Problems
By Lilly Hearle, Social Media Scholarship Recipient, Summer 2017, Street Scenes: Imagining Cosmopolitan London
Plugs, voltage, electronics, I hate them all! Well…it’s a love-hate relationship.
My flight was at least seventeen hours long. I went from Salt Lake City Airport to LAX, sat around for five hours, and then took my ten hour flight to London Heathrow. After that I waited in line for an hour just to show my passport and letter. By then, even with my extra battery, my phone was dead as a student with a twenty page paper due in at midnight and it’s 11:58. But that was not the end! Never! I waited at the station for another hour for our no-show-group. From there it was a forty-minute train to Gloucester Road and then another twenty-minute walk to our flat (it took so long because I stopped at the metro gate house first on accident). Of course my phone needed charging. It was practically screaming in its dead dementor breath scream to GIVE IT LIFE!!!
So, when I was all settled and my suitcase was open and scattered all over the floor, I found my adapter/ converter and plugged it in. Yeah. Then my floor manager came in and asked me and my roommates if we were plugging stuff in…
But never fear! It wasn’t mine. God bless me. Mine was planning a last-minute-just-when-you-need-it-the-most sneak attack.
Of course I had other problems with that darn adapter, too. My laptop would make an obnoxious buzzing sound which was especially annoying when using headphones (I fixed it by touching the metal lining on my laptop—shock absorption), and my multi USB brick adapter thing completely gave up the ghost. But on the last day of my trip, just as I was getting ready to leave for a nice little one-night-stay at a hotel near the airport, my phone stopped. Yup, it just stopped and then it was gone. I tried plugging it in, for perhaps it was just sleeping, having exhausted its limits. And it became a heated brick of fire!! You see, the thing you learn about adapters and stuff is that when it starts to get bad, it will only get worse. At the start of my trip, the adapter sometimes wouldn’t work on my phone. I would sleep all night and not wake up in the morning because my phone had died, leaving me without an alarm. By the end, my laptop was having trouble with heating up when I plugged it in, too.
I found a way around it by plugging in my extra battery and then plugging that into my phone after I let my phone die and rest a while so that it wouldn’t overheat. But the true moral of this story is simply this: Converters are our enemies and as long as we have converters in the world, we will have wars and suffering. Just kidding. It’s that, if you’re staying in London for more than a month, then buy adapters that work and a lot of them in case they don’t. You will always need a back-up plan. And extra batteries are a life saver when playing Pokémon Go (that was the original reason I bought that extra battery).
