This week while my spouse was out of town, I took it upon myself to go nuts and remove 700 tons of obsolete computing technology from our world. This massive office reorganization entailed recycling hundreds of magazines and catalogs and taking advantage of the new computer recycling program Staples has instituted the Staples Computer Recycling Program.
I’ve been avoiding dealing with old technology for years. I refused to put all those creepy chemicals from monitors and circuit boards into a landfill, so they have been collecting dust under our desks and in boxes stashed all over the place.
It was a good thing that James wasn’t here because the project took two days. At the end of day one, it looked like a gigantic nerdy bomb had exploded in his office because I threw all the stuff on the floor first. (The first step to organization is often big disorganization.) After I sorted through everything, I had to make about 79 trips from our offices up the hill to the truck in the garage one bag/box/whatever at a time. (I had to use a hand truck for the monitors, which was harsh!)
However, in the end, the recycling fest was totally satisfying. The dump run was downright thrilling as I dumped a gazillion old MSDN cardboard boxes and the countless magazines into recycle land.
The folks at Staples were nice, if somewhat surprised at the sheer volume of stuff I had to recycle. The manager came out with one of their long monitor-moving carts. It took two trips with the cart stacked to the brim. They charged to recycle the printers, CPUs, scanner, and the monitors, but everything else was free.
And the best news is that it’s all GONE!