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.
I painfully threw away three P.C.s just this week. (Score:4, Interesting)
Took out the hard drives... maybe... maybe... I'll mount them and extract them.
Took out the memory (???? who is going to use the old memory- why did I do that?)
Threw two away- put the other on the curb (it felt like a super high quality case someone might want).
Entire box of random cables (sorted through it and kept 5 "special" cables but tossed the rest.
When in doubt, watch an episode of Hoarders.
Trying to get my house in decent shape for a party this weekend.
At least the new tech is small (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:At least the new tech is small (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You call that hoarding? (Score:4, Interesting)
My 'tech closet' is very similar, although not so neatly organized. I have a big box of random video/audio cables, and another box of PC parts, ranging from expansion cards for things like SATA when SATA wasn't integrated, and video capture cards. The rest consists of old optical drives, old IDE/SATA drives, Motherboards, old video cards, etc. Every few years I go through and throw out items that I'm not likely to need anymore (simm's, ISA cards, 10MB NIC's, etc). Although I can see things getting very messy, I do have a sig other to keep things in perspective. I would only hope that others who keep a similar stash have someone else to keep them in line from time to time.
I do occasionally have to defend the value of my tech closet. I have saved friends and family some significant cash over the years just by recycling parts from there. I probably re-use maybe 30-40 percent and the rest gets tossed, but better some reuse/value than none at all.
Partial Reinforcement (Score:5, Interesting)
Any psych-turned-CS person will tell you that the hardest behaviors to break are partial reinforcement.
Behaviors that don't pay off all the time, but sometimes do.
Anyone who has saved hours of time by pulling out an obscure manual from the bottom of a pile, or recovered data with the help of a rare connector type from the junk closet, is getting partially reinforced.
And therefore, will continue to collect.
Re:I painfully threw away three P.C.s just this we (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I used to do this (Score:3, Interesting)
When my marriage broke up and I lost the house, I had a half dozen computers and a whole bunch of other stuff. I moved into a tiny apartment with my then-teenaged daughter, and left most of it at the old house the bank was taking. First, there just wasn't room (I had to rent a storage shed for the stuff I did keep), and second, moving all my junk just became too painful. I still have all (well, most) of my cables, though, and the woman who's staying with me now bitches because I'm a hoarder.
Re:You call that hoarding? (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to have many, many more boxes of parts and wires I never used, but now I have a wife, and she is the opposite of a hoarder: she's a compulsive thrower-outer. If you can't justify its existence, it's gone.
My wife used to try that. Then she ended up needing a few cables or such. I told her to go to BestBuy to price them. Then I'd go to my closet and pull out a few, or make one up from others. She learned real quick that my stash is not just a random collection of wires.
Re:Partial Reinforcement (Score:3, Interesting)
Right; if I give something away, I know I'm going to need it in the next 6 to 12 months.
I gave away my last AGP video card a couple of years back. 4 weeks later, my fileserver went down with bad capacitors on its AGP video card.
I gave away my solderless breadboards. I've since had to replace them....
Power supplies... RAM DIMMs... you name it.
(Part of this is because I'm the fix-it guy for a small start-up and all my friends, especially the ones with "restricted finances" let's say.)
Anything that's truly not needed, I can't give away: QIC 150 SCSI tape drive, for example, or 3X CD-ROM caddy-loading drives.
So I'll stick with organizing things instead of trying to get rid of them. If I do get a new technology X, it's best to try and sell the old one right away. Don't wait a year or two until it's beyond obsolete, but not a classic.
Re:You call that hoarding? (Score:3, Interesting)
We have an open marriage. I'm useful to her not because I satisfy her sexually, though I do at least as well in that regard as anyone who has been married for ten years, but rather, because we have each other's back, because we have the same moral center, and because our strengths complement each other's weaknesses.
Re:My Dad's house looked like Mike Quinn's (Score:1, Interesting)
Where you wanna go is the Electronics Flea Market [electronic...market.com] in Cupertino.
Haul it to the Flea Market, and whatever people don't buy (or take for free :), that you can send to the recyclers. (I use ACCRC [slashdot.org] for my recycling needs, on account of they'll not only recycle the dreck, they'll probably find a cool use for any interesting/vintage parts that happen to show up... or even just build a skull [accrc.org] out of old PC motherboards and flat panel displays.)