A couple weeks ago, Aaron found this ad while browsing through the local paper:
It’s true: I tend to hoard old electronics. Like my old Power Mac 6500, and the Frankenstein PC that was my first foray into replacing major parts (like the motherboard and processor), and that old bondi blue iMac I picked up at the Goodwill a few years back in a fit of nostalgia.
So, after some sorting of cables and cleaning-off of hard drives, Aaron and I loaded up our trunk full of obsolete electronics and headed out to The Andersons for some eCycling.
Saturday’s weather was pretty dismal, ranging from drizzly to an all-out downpour, so we were hoping that the event was still going on. Luckily, once we got there, we saw that it was indeed in full swing.
The suggested donation was $5, according to the ad. However, once we got there, we saw that the donation was actually a bit more than just “appreciated.”
There were local high school student volunteers slinging the equipment into the appropriate piles. They seemed to be making the best of their rainy day, ogling at all the ancient electronics that may well have been older than they were. It was painful (but cathartic in a way) to see one of them look at my once-cherished 4X external CD burner with partitioned hard drive, shrug, and lob it into a giant box of other random computer stuff.
Our load included two towers, one compact Mac, one iMac, an external CD burner with hard drive, a couple boxes of cords and cables, a super 8 editor, and a few Mac keyboards. I have to wonder what the kids thought of our donation, and what other kinds of bizarre stuff they saw offloaded.
In amongst the CRT graveyard, i spied a pink iMac, and wondered if my bondi blue would soon join it:
Once our trunk was once again emptied (sans umbrellas, of course, which stayed safe and sound), one of the students closed the trunk with what he must have thought was a manly double-thump on the top to let us know they were done. We, along with possibly hundreds of other Toledoans, had successfully lightened the load.
Hopefully, these monitors and other gadgets won’t end up in some electronics graveyard in China, picked apart by peasants for pennies a day. The fact that they were sitting out in the drizzle leads me to believe they certainly won’t be redonated. In any case, it feels good to have a.) gotten rid of a bunch of clutter, and b.) done so in a more environmentally-conscious way than we might have otherwise.
