In my study, I have a pair of large desks against one wall, and lots of cables running back and forth between things on those desks. Most of the cables, both here and in my previous flat, trailed along the floor behind the desks. This was fine to begin with, but as I accumulated more and more computer equipment, I reached the point where if I stretched my feet out they would encounter an enormous pile of cables, mains adapters and power strips. This was (a) uncomfortable, (b) unaesthetic, (c) risked me accidentally unplugging something if I fidgeted the wrong way, and (d) made it impossible to hoover that area.

So this month I decided to do something about it. I obtained some string netting by the standard method of obtaining weird things in the modern world (i.e. Google and a credit card), and I've just spent most of this afternoon crouching behind my desks, hanging the netting in a half-tube from hooks I screwed into the underside of the desks, threading all the cables through the resulting space, and cramping my back. Now I can stretch my feet out and all they encounter is nice warm carpet. The plan was entirely successful.

Somewhat too successful, in fact: I bought more netting than I needed, on the assumption that I would probably end up having to throw the first lot away and do it all again with slightly different-sized pieces, and/or have to double the netting up for strength, and/or something else I hadn't thought of. Then I added a standard fudge factor to that as well, and ended up ordering a 4m×10m sheet of netting, which I thought ought to be more than enough even in the worst case.

But in fact the plan worked perfectly the first time, and I ended up using a piece of netting that was more like 4m×50cm. Leaving me with a rather silly 95% of the original sheet left, which is currently cluttering up my spare room and will shortly instead be cluttering up my loft.

So, um. I don't suppose anyone has any use for a large piece of netting?