Magic Carpet
I’ve since moved into a workspace with wood laminate flooring, but the floor in my first office was covered in carpet — as well as a cable that stretched all the way from my coworker’s phone to the jack across the room. I’ll tell you, it’s pretty tough to glide gracefully across one’s office when a killer phone cord is laying in wait to ambush one’s unsuspecting feet. Okay, maybe I’m being a little overdramatic… but we did get snagged on a regular basis.
My office-mates and I tried to make things a little safer with a plastic dropover cord cover, but no luck — while you can usually apply a little double-sided tape to keep dropovers in place on smooth floors, that trick doesn’t work on carpet, and the thing just kept sliding around.
One day not long after, I was planning a project that resulted in the SafCord cord cover coming across my desk. It never had the chance to stray far from my desk after that, because I wasted no time in slapping it down over that phone cable running across the floor. “What is it about the SafCord,” I’m sure you’re asking, “that let it do the job no other cord cover could?”
First of all , it’s made specifically for loop-style carpets, the family of floor coverings to which the commercial-grade carpet on my office floor belonged (I should mention here that it also works on Berber and looped rugs). When you put it down, it doesn’t budge — not even if you vacuum over it. Yet you can pull the SafCord up at any time, without any sign that it had ever been there. Would you believe me if I told you that there is no adhesive involved? The magic that locks it into place on carpet is actually just the “hook” side of hook-and-loop, which grabs onto looped carpet fibers.
Other cool features include the fact that SafCord has a completely flat profile (because it’s made of Cordura Nylon fabric), can be cut to length with scissors, is machine washable, and can be reused countless times. Oh yeah, and it also hides cords and prevents you from tripping…
Velcro ONE-WRAP®, a thousand uses…
One of the first products I got to play with in my early days at CableOrganizer is still one of my favorites: the Velcro® ONE-WRAP® wire wrap. Yes, you heard right, a Velcro® cable tie. I’ve been a big Velcro® fan for most of my life, starting with the hook-and-loop fastened sneakers in my pre-shoelace-tying days, and proceeding all the way up through my college years, when double-sided Velcro® tape stood in for nails when I wanted to hang things on my dorm room wall.
Fast forward to 2006, when I found out that Velcro® is also terrific for bundling cables into neat coils. These little belt-shaped wraps loop around extension cords, computer cables, ropes, and really anything else that you can coil up and bundle. They adhere to themselves, so they’re incredible easy to use, and you can reuse them almost infinitely — it seems that no matter how many time you fasten and unfasten them, they never wear out.
Needless to say, it didn’t take me long to start converting my friends and family to Velcro-ism… so far, my Dad carries them along anytime he needs to take computer equipment on the road, my rock star Bro uses them to manage the cables on his recording equipment, and my friend the aesthetician finds that they keep the cords hanging off a laser machine perfectly tidy.
So, what will you use them for?