Interfaces: Power Plugs

This is actually quite a literal one.  I travel for my job from time to time.  When I do, like so many other business travelers, I find myself taking an ever-increasing amount of tech with me; some of it for work, some for communications, and some just for fun.  So I end up with a laptop, an iPad, a Kindle Fire, a PS Vita, an Apple Watch, an iPhone, Bluetooth headset for the phone, proper Bluetooth earphones for music, a nice set of plug-in headphones for when I'm playing Minecraft on the plane, and so on.
Of course, I also end up bringing along about four hundred linear feet of charging cable, because each of these things has its own gimmicky way of charging up.  A lot of them use Mini-USB, which is handy, and the Apple stuff has its own proprietary cable design, and the watch has that weird magnetic induction thing.
The real problem is that each of these things needs a power outlet.  Now, about half the time this isn't a real issue, since I'm probably traveling somewhere in Japan or North America, or even Trinidad, where they all use the same 100/110 volt system with the same plug.  But last year I went to Mauritius, which used to be French, which means that the house current is about a billion volts.  There aren't even any wires in a building in Mauritius.  If you open up the cover plate on the power socket, you just see random lightning bolts shooting around inside there.  I had to buy this weird adapter thing the size of my fist that cost about fifty bucks just to plug in one piece of equipment.  No way was I going to be able to keep all my electronics alive for the whole two week trip.  I looked at all the charging cables, bound up into a wad the size of a child's forearm, and began to despair.
And then just as quickly began not to despair, because I realized something.  All these devices are weird and different formats at one end, but at the other they are all identical: USB jacks.
I went down to Don Quijote and bought a four-port wall-to-USB adapter for about five hundred yen, and then a four-port USB hub for about two hundred.  I could plug the adapter into the power converter, and plug the hub into the adapter.  Anything left over I could plug into my laptop, which has extra USB ports.
It's convenient when something lives up to its name, and the Universal Serial Bus does just that.  It's supposed to be for data transfer, but since it carries power as well, it's just too handy.  I've started seeing, in newer homes, USB ports in wall sockets next to the regular outlets.
Power cords haven't always been so uniform.  I can remember seeing older appliances with the old braided insulation, which reminded me too much of a fuse for me to be very comfortable in using.  As a musician, most of the cables I dealt with (and still do) harken back to the glory days of radio: 5-pin microphone connectors; quarter-inch audio cables; eighth-inch headphone cables; RCA plugs; coaxial cable; and the like.  There was a legitimate reason for each of these designs to exist back then.  5-pin provided better audio recording and broadcasting quality.  RCA plugs were difficult to knock loose.  Quarter-inch cables could handle repeated connecting and disconnecting.
I'm starting to think that just about everything worldwide should be USB. It seems to be able to handle just about everything, except the heavy power load of larger electrical appliances, like clothes dryers and dishwashers.  A Microsoft Surface Pro is pretty much the same device no matter which country it works in.  By the time the electricity gets to the actual device it's been stepped down a fair bit.
Maybe we'll see the USB become truly universal, until induction recharging gets up to speed.  This might not be a particularly profound topic, but I'm fascinated by it.
Maybe they'll even solve the mystery of why it takes three tries to plug one in.