I recently bought a professional trimmer from Amazon, because I’ve worn through a couple of low quality ones bought in Sweden.

During the purchase, I didn’t consider what market the trimmer was targeted at. After growing a hipster beard for two weeks, it finally arrived, but with an American charger. Yuck.

In one of my many boxes, I found an adapter with the same plug size for a laser show system that I bought from AliExpress before my beard even started to grow. Of course, that charger was not CE-marked, and in my excitement of finding a plug of the correct size I didn’t check for a matching voltage. After about 5 minutes, the plug went off, and the charger smelled of burnt plastic.

Luckily, the not so cheap trimmer survived. Ok… A new approach is needed. I bought one of those chargers with a set of exchangeable tips and adjustable voltage.

Well, this was a harder problem than I thought. Still no tip fits. The yellow seem promising, but it’s a tiny bit too large. Finally, I took the old burnt charger, cut off the cord and stuffed the raw cords into the holes of the adapter, and taped it all with duct tape. It works! Note: I’m not breaking the law here, since I’m allowed to repair and change broken adapter cords without certification.

What makes this a pretty rare phenomenon is the requirements of standards and interoperability on the European market. The European law requires that if and only if an electric plug fits into a hole, it must be safe.

It’s tragic that there is no unified standard between Europe and the US (not to mention other countries that all use their own “standard”, I’m looking you, UK, India and Switzerland). I guess it’s currently politically impossible, since it would mean that either would have to change all of their infrastructure, but not the other one. The reason we have blue emergency lights is due to a Convention on Road Traffic (Vienna 1968). I’ve heard rumours that to make sure the transition for all countries was economically fair the color blue was picked since no country used that color for their existing emergency vehicles. The reason no one used blue is that it’s a lot easier to see orange/red. I’ve not found a source of the rumor, so maybe it’s an urban legend, but it illustrates the political problem of unfairness and unwillingness to change.