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True Tales of Tech Hoarding
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.
Only one closet full? Pfft, lightweight. Come back when you have a real collection!
It would be interesting to find out if the reason why some of us are so attached to old hardware just might be that it was not long ago that that hardware was mind boggingly expensive. My brother sometimes took a IBM model 5155 home and let me play nethack on it. At that time you could buy a nice car for that money instead of such a beast.
More than 10 years later I got my hands on one of these, but sadly parted with it under the influence of my wife at the time. (Yup, we divorced.). Seeing a picture of it still fills me with awe thinking how expensive this machine once was. Maybe that awe combined with a but-it-still-works attitude makes us think twice about throwing such stuff away?
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
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 need all my old devices it is our only hope!
The first sign of trouble is when you said/thought, at least I am not as bad as X. oh goodness.
The second sign: an intervention by way of watching a tv show devoted to your disease.
Take it from a former hoarder: just throw everything away (donate, trash, etc). There are way
more important things in life than, well, "things". Once you start spending as much time, energy,
and care for the people in and around your life, I doubt you will ever hoard again.
-sent from my cray-
jp
applies in this case. It states that an item's usefullness increases ten-fold as soon as it is thrown away. Hoarding is only natural.
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.
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.