doomkeeper

I am a hoarder born and bred. I keep way too much stuff. Up until very recently I kept the box from everything I ever bought and I did this as totally standard practice. Whenever I moved I would package things up in their original boxes. I found it abhorrent when I saw friends and colleagues discard their newly opened boxes immediately and simply keep the contents. “What if they need to send it back? What if they need to sell it? Wouldn’t it be damaged if they moved?” At the same time I was slightly impressed by how enlightened they were.

My old house mate had no clutter at all and lived in the smallest room in the house. He was brilliant at being able to throw nearly anything away. I conversely had the biggest room in the house consistently, to make room for all of my clutter. I had bits of old computers, boxes of books, papers, wires, you name it. I still had boxes that I hadn’t opened since we last moved house. His attitude was always “if you haven’t needed it in 6 months, you’ll probably never need it. just throw it out!” The boxes in question contained old computer science books, university notes, assorted trinkets from old employers, “you worked on such’n'such a product thank you for all your hard work”, type stuff. He was right of course, except with the books. What would a geek be without his library of dusty text books? It was extremely difficult for me at first, but slowly and surely I started to throw things out. You know I had kept nearly every CD I’d ever burnt?

Its not all my fault, my Dad is also a master hoarder. When I was growing up, every Tuesday night was “Coat’s Auction Rooms” night. My Dad would without fail bring some assortment of junk back. Boxes of miscellaneous and the n-teenth record player. It wouldn’t be so bad if we sold any of them for a profit, which I believe was some of the motivating factor, but rather that we fill every remaining square foot in our house with the stuff. To this day my parents attic is literally the graveyard of record players from 1930-1980. The saving grace being that ‘Coats’ went out of business and the junk was cut off at the source.  He’s recently bought a bunch of “Royal Marine Drums!” off of ebay, I kid you not, for selling at profit. *sigh* Anyway, you can see where I get it from.

Fortunately I was again forced out of necessity to stop this by living in a 550 square foot apartment, where there isn’t even enough room to twirl ones feline friend. Out went piles of boxes, clothes from 1995-2008 into the charity bins. And you know what? It feels pretty good to be free of some of that stuff! Like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. It helps to have an instrumental non-hoarder to help you see the light mind you.Victoria certainly helped me a lot.

Surely there’s knock on effects of this? What about the landfills? I always felt it was ironic that the same house mate was also banging the green drum in the house most of the time was the one telling me to throw everything out. Anyways that leads me nicely to my main point.

I was reading an article in Popular Mechanics recently about how we have become a throw away culture and how this traditionally was never the case. I’m not talking boxes now, more items that have been broken and that now just replaced rather than being repaired. Because of the mentality of my old house mate the repair man has become a rare skill. People don’t really bother fixing things anymore! “Why bother fix it when you can just buy a new one?”

Circa 1980 we would never really dreamed of replacing an entire product just because it had broken down. The example they used in PM was a dishwasher, a very expensive item years ago. A small cog/wheel that allows the trays to slide in and out of the machine had broken off, so that tray would fall down inside the machine. The PM guy simply machined out a new replacement wooded cog himself on a lathe and the dishwasher was a good as new. Most people would have seemly gotten a new one and missed out on the joy of taking something that was destined for the junk pile and given it a new lease of life.

There are other factors at play here of course. Newer models are more energy efficient and would actually be better for the environment. Miniaturisation of components as meant its become much harder to solder on a new resistor or patch a dry joint. The cost of building such machines is now much, much cheaper as most things are automated. But the cost of throwing away an item is still reasonably high. That said the car being one of the biggest polluters on the planet is ones of the most recyclable items out there. Nearly everything on a car is recycled, from the seats to the, oil left in the engine, it’s all recycled.

Recently I was building a new NAS machine at home, the first time I’d built a computer in literally years. The build was going quite successfully until I realised that there was not enough to screws to finish the job and of the ones left were the wrong size. Normally of course I’d have a whole pile of old machines to go digging through, but I had thrown them all out! So I was totally stuck. I could hear the hoarder in my head says “I told you so!”. This was quite annoying, how the hell can you get a pile of correctly fitting screws? I was taking out the recycling the same night and someone had junked their old computer in our garbage room. It didn’t have much inside it, a few ide cables, floppy drive, dvd writer, and old motherboard and a whole harvest of screws! I collected everything I could salvage and brought them upstairs. All the screws fitted perfectly, I was able to use the ide cable too and continue the build.

Ok this wasn’t an amazing example of fixing things but I really did get the joy of taking something that doomed for the dump and giving it new life. The thing that really surprised me was totally revulsion of my girlfriend as I brought back some of this stuff to life. She implied it was almost like a “homeless person”, “disgusting” and she certainly did not share my joy. She actually sneakily threw the rest of the stuff I’d rescued out while I wasn’t looking! I’ve forgiven her of course, but it does highlight a problem in our society. Maybe if I’d have just had the parts hanging around it would have been ok? Then I’m a hoarding of course.

To conclude, I believe that our a society has a worsening problem.  A culture of “throw-it-out” as it’s broken is now quite prolific. Newer generations are not even aware of the possibility of repair and joy of accomplishment. If ever there was a global catastrophe and we were forced to make do with what we had might be a very bad place. I’m not suggesting we all start hoarding things and building bomb shelters, but just to think “Can I repair this? Do I really need to throw it out? What are the consequences?”. Its a rewarding and valuable skill that we should try and instill and then maybe we will inspire a whole new generation of repair men and women.