There’s a graveyard in my closet. A Rubbermaid plot where almost every laptop, digital camera, and cellphone I’ve ever had rests in chaos. There are so many charging cords I could probably make a rope to rappel down the side of my house.
But my collection paled next to helveticka’s – desktop and laptop computers, cables and connectors, keyboards and mice, external drives, network hubs, routers, speakers, scanners, printers, and wiring accumulated over 25 of the firm’s 37 years. A quarter-century is an eon in modern tech. Tools emerge and become obsolete whiplash-fast, and some of us hang on longer than we should.
The thing was valuable.
The thing might still be valuable.
The thing stores something valuable.
The thing sparks memories that are valuable. (Okay this one is 100 percent me.)
All that value goes on existing if the thing camps in a closet, waiting for us to find time to deal with it.
CK found time recently. Having cofounded the firm a year after Adobe Illustrator launched in 1987, he has seen endless evolution in creative technology. However compelling, fads were forgone in favor of enduring quality. That cut down on device retirements and system conversions over the years, but dinosaurs still ended up roaming the work room.
So CK made a pile, and Shirlee helped him decide what could go to the recycling center. Inland Retech accepts “pretty much anything with a battery or a cord” (and sells VCRs for $10 and up!). I didn’t bother asking CK who’d been attached to the computers or what the speakers had played. He doesn’t suffer from terminal sentimentality like me. Even if he did, this was work equipment. Circuits and plastic just taking up space next to project archives that will one day be recycled too.
That’s where I’d have the biggest problem – shredding the only evidence certain work was ever done (there’s a famous story in my family about me confronting my mother for trashing my math homework). My garage contains print copies of every magazine and newspaper article I’ve ever written, a library of my 23-year working life that absolutely no one needs. Not even me. I will say that I got a good chuckle out of the review I did on “diet” chocolate breath spray in 2003, as I visited my clips during a move.
Every now and then my husband looks longingly at the shelf space under my boxes, but after a decade together he knows not to ask. I’m not a hoarder, but if something was ever meaningful it stays that way. In the case of my Nokia brick, it’s the text messages that only exist there. The cameras remind me of the travels and everyday beauty they captured. The cords stay because I don’t know what goes with what anymore. And the 3.5-inch floppy disks labeled “ERIN’S TOP SECRET FILES” await a sympathetic geek with an ancient computer.
The internet is full of questions from people wondering what to do with their old tech. Most want to sell, donate, or recycle it, though some are looking for ways to restore or repurpose things. Maybe for retro cool points, or maybe because “old pieces of technology get linked inextricably to the simpler times they belonged to.”
That’s part of why I’m sitting on my relics. If I can’t pull the data, there’s always the floppy disk kokiriko, an inspired rip-off of the traditional Japanese instrument that one commenter says “sounds like someone farting.”
Everybody wins.
