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5

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#5. My wife and I own five computers between us.

Actually, it used to be more. We cleaned out a couple of crappy old paperweights-with-floppy-drives when we moved, and ditched an old monitor while we were at it. We seem to just accumulate useless techno-junk. I’ve got two machines I’m not really using, and she’s got a Man laptop that’s collecting dust. Unless I can talk her into letting me hook them up on a LAN for a kick-ass Quake Arena party, then we’re just wasting space with these crap-boxes.

Still, I’m a computer programmer. And the first thing you’re taught in a technical job is, ‘Never give up hardware‘. There’s this feeling, however wrongheaded, that someday, you’ll be able to use that old box, or switch, or antiquated Jaz drive. Forget the computers — I’ve got two boxes of peripherals and internals just taking up room. Cables, disk drives, Zip disks, adapters, boards, mice… you name it. If you can install it into a computer, or hook it up, or plug it in, then I’ve probably got three of them, in various shapes, sizes, and colors. I could daisy-chain serial cables to the corner store and back. I could build a serial-to-USB-to-serial-to-parallel-to-serial-to-USB-to-FireWire-to-seral adapter, using male or female adapters at any point in there. I could plug a monitor in in my attic, and string cables down to hook it up to a computer in my basement. Okay, I don’t know why I would, but I could, and that’s what’s important. We have the technology.

Anyway, I look at this crap, and I know that in the end, I’m just gonna end up chucking ninety-eight percent of it in the trash, once it’s obviously obsolete. It’s just that I don’t know which two percent to keep. There’s simply no way to predict or determine which of the cables is going to come in handy when we buy a new printer, or which drive will actually fit in an old case to let me stock up on MP3s. And so, I keep it all, banking on the slim but real prospect of needing something — anything — in the tangle of wires and chips, and finally being able to say to my wife, ‘Aha! See? And you wanted me to throw this away! Tsk.‘

In the meantime, I’m still working the Quake Arena angle, or maybe multiplayer Half-Life. Then all that shit will come in handy. It’ll just be a shame when I get my guts scattered while I’m playing in the basement, and I gotta go all the way to the attic to see my fragged self. That’s gonna be a bitch, man. Talk about lag time. Those stairs are hell.