Don't cut the cord!

I've never understood the desire that men feel to cut the umbilical cord. I didn't feel the need with any of my kids but I've had some conversations with dads who seemed pretty proud of themselves. Sure you helped make the baby, but you cutting the cord doesn't mean that you helped with the birth. By the time you get to that point the birth is done. It's like the ribbon cutting in front of new buildings. A 3 foot pair of scissors and a hard hat don't make you part of the construction crew. Your wife just shot a human being out her lady parts while you held her hand. Cutting a couple of blood vessels does not put you on equal ground.
But this isn't about umbilical cords, this is about tools.
I understand the appeal of cordless tools. They really do have a huge convenience factor for professionals who otherwise have to find a place to plug things in, and then have to worry about dragging a cord all over the inside of someone's house. They also use them daily and plug them in to charge at night. No matter what tools they use, they have a limited life span. For a professional they make sense.

I don't think they do for the occasional around the house tool user. The main point is that once you go cordless you move from one failure point to three failure points. A corded drill can certainly fail, but you only have one point of failure, the drill. With a cordless drill you have the drill, the battery and the charger that can all fail. Over the years I've had one battery failure and one charger failure. By the time they failed replacements were impossible to find. So I still had a working drill, I just didn't have to parts to make it work. They were both 5-7 years old and throwing them away sucked. The only corded drill I've managed to kill was a 40+ year old drill that I killed while wire brushing undercoating off a car. I used that drill for over 5 years after I bought it and I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't beat on it then it would still be alive. My current drill I've had now for 5 years and there is no reason it shouldn't be around in another 40 years at it's current rate of use. Go look around a store at all of the cordless drills you see. Every one of them will be in a landfill in 40 years. The batteries and chargers will all fail. Technology will move on and they will be obsolete. They will have to be replaced repeatedly. It used to be that you could expect to inherit your father's tools and then pass them down to your kids. Lots of things used to be like that. You bought them expecting them to last as long as you've ever need them. Until recently tools were one of the last segments of consumer goods still made with that thinking in mind. Now even there they build in obsolescence in the name of convenience. Not with everything, a good hammer should still outlast you. Just a few years ago I would have said the same thing about screwdrivers too but now we've gone from regular or phillips to one of 1000 different security screws. That drives me nuts too. I urge you to not head down the road of knowingly buying something that will fail and become unrepairable when you buy tools. Not as long as you don't have to. Don't cut the cord yet, you've got 18 years before you need to do that.