I was sitting at a desk and couldn’t get the ethernet cable to reach my computer from the middle of the room. I traced the cable back to a cluster of splitters tied up around the legs of several tables pushed against each other. The actual ethernet port was way over on the other side of the room. However after untangling the mess of cables, it was now too short to reach from the wall to the splitters. Someone told me that the cable had simply retracted back to its normal length. I tried not to think too hard about the mechanics as I stretched the cable back out like a piece of taffy.