I left the charger to my cheapo cell phone in a Jacksonville motel room a two weekends ago, and when I went to the AT&T store to replace it, the fuckers wanted THIRTY BUCKS for a new one.

I walked. When I went to Radio Shack, they had adapter plugs for $10, but then you had to buy the universal charger — for THIRTY BUCKS.

I was all set to bite the bullet and buy the AT&T charger when my colleague Jamie piped up with a suggestion: Go to a hotel, tell them you stayed there and left your charger. They'll pull out a box of chargers that you can rifle through and grab one that fits.

I headed to a semi-upscale hotel in Tampa and gave the the woman at the desk the story. She asked for my name — I gave her my real one — and started perusing the computer for it. Hmm, I thought, not as easy as Jamie made it out to be. She said she had no record of me. I did the hem-and-haw thing, told her it might've been under a corporate account, then just stood there, mum. After a few seconds, she said, "Would you like to look in our box and see if you can find it?"

"That would be great," I replied all sunny-like.

She produced box of tangled cell phone chargers that looked like a ball of black yarn a cat had ravaged. I started picking through it. Apparently, every cell phone make has a different style charger (easier to sell expensive replacements that way). I went through about 20 plugs that poked out of the wire ball. Nothing. Just about to give up, I spotted one in the morass of black. Plugged it — it fit.

This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...