As I sort through a 10,000 sq foot building housing 79 years of debris, I find myself reluctant to dispose of things that are clearly junk. I've become Bob...the consummate pack rat. My father Bob will absolutely NOT dispose of anything...even if the only value left in it is the particles of matter waiting to be recycled by the cosmos. It's still worth something to him. Bob's affliction is partly a result of the times in which he was raised, but mostly it's a genetic family trait thought to be recessive and tending to skip every other generation...until now.
I look at the sheer volume of things slated for disposal and think I am throwing away money based on the volume of junk alone. I mean, in a pile this big, someone should be able to scrounge a couple bucks from somewhere, right? Of course, I know I am wrong. Nobody except a sub-Saharan tribesman would use the computer stuff we are tossing, and they would probably use it to carry water to their families. Old manuals for software (many dating back to the DOS era), hundreds of old disks, obsolete BNC routers, broken monitors, switches, mice and keyboards...you know...Ejunk. But stack all this crap into ONE PLACE, and you begin thinking you should start a store. In my office, I sort have done just that, as I find myself spiriting away junk to accumulate based on the premise that it has intrinsic value if none financially.
I have 52...yes 52 stray IEC power cords for computers and misc related gizmos. 24 stray "wall wart" power supplies that the gods of computer trash only know where the poor, unpowered device it mated with is lurking. I have dozens of parallel cables, slightly fewer serial, and 1 lonesome USB without a machine. Don't even mention the cardboard box of just phone cords. Must be hundreds. My God, did they EVER throw anything away here in the 60 years prior to me? But this shit is on the SHELVES in the local Wal-Mart. Whaddya mean it's junk?
Remember the hereditary affliction Bob's syndrome? This was a family business, you can guess the answer to that one.
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2 comments:
I am the exact same way-- I save freaking AOL CDs because I could use them as coasters or something. I am trying to throw stuff away but it isn't easy. Luckily it's just my own crap that I have to deal with and not an entire company's worth of garbage equipment. Maybe what you need to do is seek inspiration in the Office Space scene where they destroy the copier or fax machine, I don't recall what is was... and just go ballistic on it-- take out all your frustrations! :-)
Good idea #2. Problem is that smashing it to pieces just means I have to pay more to dispose of it!
2 halves of a monitor would be twice the disposal cost I presume.
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