Grab Bag #1: Electricity

(A series of other things I intended to write about while I was away but didn't have time to do)

In last year's Rome stay, our second apartment was severely deficient in electrical outlets for today's multiplicity of devices. In this year's apartment, there were, I think, substantially more outlets, but the wall outlets, renovated with the addition of electricical capabilties, were not

configured correctly for the things that one might wish to plug into them. This was true not only of plugs made for non-Southern-European appliances including American devices, but also for Italian appliances such as three prsesent in the kitchen--a toaster, an electric kettle, and a Nespresso coffee maker, all three of which were incompatible with the two outlets between the stove and the sink. The usual wall outlet was designed to receive three thin pins in a straight line. When I raised the matter with one of the agents, she said, oh, there's supposed to be an L adapter (I think that's what she called it) for the kettle. And so it proved--the intermediary adapter had three thin pins and received plugs with two fat pins, such as those three appliances had; I had not yet tried to use the kettle, which was on an upper shelf, but at the end of its cord was an adapter which worked for the toaster and the coffee maker too--only one at a time, of course.

For our own devices--two laptops, two iPhones, one Apple Watch, one hearing-aid charger, one Kindle, and plus two CPAPs every night and two Magfast power banks that needed to be recharged less often--we had to figure out which ones to charge in the bedroom and which could be further away (e.g., those that didn't have alarm clocks in them), or even downstairs (the laptops). In some cases lamps had to be unplugged. Compared to last year in Rome, it was much easier to ensure that everything needing charging got charged. It was not what I'd call hard to accomplish, but it took a lot of time every day, usually at bedtime, to make sure that everything was set up to meet our charging needs. There were frequent messy tangles of wires, of which this picture is an understated illustration. (First-world problem, though.)