TANGLED UP
All day I sorted through electronics, a mind numbing activity. In the almost thirty years since I first got a computer I have collected all kinds of computer connected electronic gear.
I entered the computer era wide eyed and enthusiastic. The computer was a huge step up from writing on the IBM selectric I was using. But it was only a short time until I realized that new computers could do far more and that my computer was out moded. This happened also when computer driven digital cameras appeared. All of a sudden I could take hundreds, even thousands of photographs at no cost and process them easily at no cost. It was magic.
Except there was a cost. The lifetime of any digital device, even flat screen televisions, was only three years, before something much better came along.
I never threw anything away. Even the endings of wires that connected devices kept changing leaving the old ones outmoded. And all kinds of devices that connected to computers kept appearing. I was lured into keeping up, delighted with each new device.
Everything outmoded was deposited into cardboard milk boxes and stored. That is what I was sorting today. From the jumble of stuff in boxes I sorted a box full of outmoded digital cameras, a box full of outmoded laptops, a box full of devices that connected to outmoded laptops and computers, a box full of wires with connecting plugs of every sort, box full after box full.
Some things I can still use. Most everything else no one can use. I don’t want them to go into the landfill so I am sorting them out so that they can be recycled. In the process I am realizing how much money I must have spent on devices that can do miraculous things at apparently no cost. I am also discovering a great deal of duplication, 15 AAA battery chargers, thirty duplicates of no longer use wires with different shaped plugins each of which came with a different device.
I can only sort for an hour or two before my brain begins to fog over and I have to quit. But what is happening to me must happen to everyone, although most people, lucky for them, are not as enthusiastic about new devices as I have been and must not have as large a collection. I even have a few ancient iPods for playing music. With all the magical things that digital devices can do, the price of being so digitally dependent is not just financial cost but also being tangled up in wires and the faded dreams of what these devices were promised to do, but only briefly, before the next device with promised dreams arrived, over and over again.
Today I paid that price.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 