What do you do when you can’t find the AC adapter for your favorite electronic gizmo? I’ve been looking for my Archos MP3 player’s charger for months now. I thought I found the charger a couple of weeks ago, but when I plugged it into the wall socket and MP3 player, nothing happened. This morning (in desperation), I tried plugging in the charger from my Norelco Beard Trimmer, and whaddya know, it worked …

We were on our way down the shore for the day and I wanted to bring along a highly recommended audiobook (on search engine optimization) that I’ve been meaning to listen to for, oh, at least the last the last month and a half.

I was a bit anxious when I plugged in the AC adapter. Visions of a fried MP3 player danced through the Imax screen in my brain, ever so briefly. Fear kicked in with Dolby surround sound and I caught just a whiff of that lovely toasted electronics smell.

It was all in my head, thankfully …

To make a long story short, when I plugged in the beard trimmer charger, my clearance-bin Archos lit up with a happy BATTERY CHARGING … message. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to fully charge the (not-so-little) beast for the trip to the beach this morning. So I cajoled my son into letting me load the audiobook on his iPod Mini for the day and off we went.

The boogie boarding was awesome, courtesy of the remnants of Hurricane Irene. The iPod worked flawlessly. I got halfway through the audiobook, between the drive and the beach. And when we got back to ranchero indebto, the Archos looked to be fully charged.

Now if only I could find my headphones … rumor was that our hounds from hell chewed them to pieces ages ago … from the sound of things, a good new set of headphones will cost me more than the Archos did when I bought it from Overstock.com (alas without an Overstock coupon) …