Free!

We've been cleaning up the garage again. A yearly or biannual exercise and our focus this time was the massive amounts of electronics stored here and there. Very old electronics. A couple of Dell desktop 486's and a couple of very old laptops. Make that three laptops and four desktops. Even a Toshiba portable PC that was at least 25 years old and forty pounds of portability. A two storage tubs filled with peripherals such as old mice, Jaz drives, Zip drives, hubs, cables and cords. Even my very first PC was still with me, an Epson with a 40MB hard drive and 12MB's of RAM. Of course every PC had a large and useless monitor to go along with it. All old and useless…to me. In my previous life I had been one of the first corporate nerds, a geek. I was one of our original IT guys and they even sent me off to learn programming. Which I never used because I was far too busy being the goto guy when someone forgot to turn on the printer and this was the 'emergency'. In exchange for my good humor, I was given new PC's to try every few months. Plus every new toy that my boss handed down to me in rapid order. And as these things aged, I selected the 'best' and collected them for some plan; which I have no memory of now.

I had enough to fill the car twice. Shameful! But where do we take this stuff? Luckily I had just read a story about a group called Computers for Classrooms. We found their address and took our first car load over to them. Incredible! They have a warehouse where computers and peripherals are stacked incredibly high. They're everywhere! On our second trip, we included all of our old cell phones and the accompanying wall warts. We were free at last! And nothing went to a landfill; that was the best part.