True Tales of Tech Hoarding 268
Recently some member of my household forced me to watch several episodes of A&E's Hoarders. This led to several *ahem* discussions about hoarding tendencies and the closet of cables, wires, boxes and parts in my basement. But I'm not doing bad compared to some of these tech hoarders. My favorite is the guy using a stack of 9 VA rack machines as an end table.
But, but, (Score:5, Funny)
I use a MicroVAX for an end table, you insensitive clod!
Re:G5 PowerMac tower - Hot (Score:2, Funny)
old-style pre-USB printer cable
And you don't even know what they're called?
That's not hoarding... (Score:5, Funny)
Bah. Pikers! Look at those photos, you can clearly see the floor in some of them! No tech hoarder worthy of the title still has a visible floor.
Re:Now who will save the world? (Score:2, Funny)
Skynet will plug a single 4Mb/s card in, the whole ring will slow down from 16Mb/s to accommodate it, and you'll spend all fucking day running around the building trying to find it.
(Wow, I'm old.)
Re:Never fails (Score:5, Funny)
What I need is a real-life OS X trash can or the Windows Recycle Bin, so I can recover things right after I trash them.
I have one of those, only the other half prefers to refer to it as a "garage". Mind you, when it fills up the seek times are horrendous.
IBM System/36 (Score:4, Funny)
I recently was forced to part with my old IBM System 36 and corresponding hard drive that was 350lbs and the size of a dishwasher. The system 36 was the original 700lb model 5630. They were used as end tables but didn't fit with my wife's tastes. I am proud to say that I was able to get the box up, with connected terminal and actually pulled data off of it (printed) in 2005. I was challenged by some friends to make it work to show it could still be put to use and damn it, the yellow paged manuals I still had made it easy.
My tech hoarding earned me some extra income as I won the bet making it work. So don't throw it out, your tech buddies will pay good money to watch you fight with 20 year old tech.
Re:Whatever. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You call that hoarding? (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't even know this was a thing until now. My room mate came up to me the other day and casually told me "My cousin thinks we have a very geeky house" and I replied, "How come?", to which he responded, "Well, we've got 4 desktops here in our living room/kitchen, only 2 of which actually get any use. This doesn't include the laptops you and I normally use, and Mike has HIS own desktop in his bedroom. Not to mention the pile of 10 or so Programming books stacked on the coffee table here, and the remaining pieces of that printer we took apart for fun last weekend. We've got posters on the walls with cheeky jokes about what you've learned from video games."
And I told him, "Yeah, I guess its a bit messy, but I mean, I don't know if its all that geeky. I mean, what do other people have lying around?"
To which he replied, "Well my cousin has posters of girls in bikini's along his wall, and many many more empty pizza boxes. His X-box has Modern Warfare 2 in the tray, ours has the movie cube2:hypercube. Where we have our router, he keeps his stereo. There is no computer in visible sight, they are all tucked away into each others bedrooms. His coffee table is littered with empty beer bottles and plastic cups, one of which has a sticky ping pong ball in it. When people come over to play Age of Empires 2, he has chicks over, and probably bones them all."
So I retorted, "Your cousin sounds like a douche"
Anyways. Anecdotes aside, my house has about as much junk as that entire article shows, except for the last 2 pictures (which are of course the most impressive, I can't keep stuff that organized)
It gets better... (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite is the guy using a stack of 9 VA rack machines as an end table.
The best part is that if you look past the stack of machines he's using as an end table, you'll see the original wooden end table shoved ignominiously into the corner.
Re:Never fails (Score:3, Funny)
That's why I "partitioned" that storage medium. On the first partition My wife has installed Volkswagen 2.0, which a lot like Apple products only does about 3 things, but she seems happy. However lately, she keeps making me format and re size the partition map so that she has more room, eventually I may have to use public storage to save things "in the cloud".
Re:I do the opposite of hoarding (Score:5, Funny)
I like to arrange them next to each other—only with one slightly higher, so you get a two-level effect with a little path running down the middle.
Re:You call that hoarding? (Score:4, Funny)
Funny thing is, I was a slight tech hoarder and my wife is a shoe/old clothes hoarder. If the clothes are wearable....even if they are more fit for a teenager....she keeps them. I harassed her to get rid of some of the stuff and she pointed out my collection of garbage. I decided to set a good example and one day started throwing out/selling/giving away/hitting with a bat most of the stuff in my tech pile. It was actually quite liberating. It is not longer difficult to find the actual USEFUL things that I rarely use amidst the piles of stuff I never used.
Never did get the wife to throw away the old clothes though. Oh well. At least it ensures that she keeps the school girl skirt. ;)
Re:Now who will save the world? (Score:1, Funny)
Dude, throw it away. It's useless: In all likelihood you've already lost the token.
Re:You call that hoarding? (Score:3, Funny)
Not coffee?
Different direction (Score:5, Funny)
NO! I can't throw away my old Token Ring cards and cables! What happens when the world goes post apocalyptic and I have to connect to a legacy system to save the world from Skynet?
I totally thought you were going to say you couldn't just throw the Token Ring cards away because you had to make sure they were disposed of properly in Mt Doom.
Re:I painfully threw away three P.C.s just this we (Score:1, Funny)
I did the same. Wasn't as useful to keep my creditcards together... :-(