Need help -- reely, I do

This is my kitchen phone.



I love my kitchen phone. It's red, and it makes me happy. Plus it never has a dead battery. It never gets misplaced. It works when the electricity is out. And I love to see the confused looks on the faces of my kids' friends when they ask to use the phone and I point to it. Most of them have never dialed a phone before.

I don't like my kitchen phone's cord, however. This is a portion of the cord.

Its only redeeming value is that it's long, and I can reach all the way to the stove with it -- or into the dining room. But it is always tangled, always under foot, always getting caught in these cupboard doors. Don't look at the cupboard doors, by the way, because they haven't been painted in about seventeen years and they're nasty.

This is a leash of Sadie's.

I don't like this leash, but I do like the reeling function of it. You can pull the leash out (or Sadie can), and it reels right back in. My vacuum cleaner has a cord reeler. When I'm done vacuuming, I push a little button and the cord slurps right back in. My hair dryer has a cord reeler. When I'm done drying my hair, I push a button and the cord just zooooops right back in.

So here's what I've been thinking. I need a phone cord reeler. And for the first time in my life, my amazing Fix-It Hubby has come up empty-handed. He ordered a little gadget from eBay but it just didn't have the zooopy slurpiness I require in a phone cord reeler. And it made the answering machine fall off, and it just was generally unsatisfactory in about eleven different ways.

He is claiming that what I need can't be accomplished, even though I have pointed to the dog leash, vacuum cleaner, and hair dryer as examples of Reel Perfection in motion.

I don't get it. I don't feel like my reel needs are out of line. It seems to me to be a matter of finding or creating a simple machine with reely capabilities.

I'm open to suggestions.