DOLLAR → | Now | ← STINKYBABBLE 2
CRAZY ONES
30 May 2015, 10:43
So yeah, I haven’t written a bit, but to be fair, hell, I haven’t treadied for a while. But I am still dropping pounds because I still eat right and I’m engaging in other strenuous hell that could be construed as exercise. I call it a penance or some sort of punishment for something I must have done.
Yes, you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Yes, I’m going to tell you.
This is my adventure into the rabbit hole involving a hoarder dude and ancient technology.
THIS IS THE POWER PC GAUNLET OF TERROR!!!
Your heroine, (MOI) is me. I put my 2008 imac on craigslist to sell because my ebay account is pooched. Craigslist to me is if you took the seedy underbelly of humanity and allowed them internet access. The personals are full of pervs, the jobs offered are… well, those you look at when Careerbuilder, Monster, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, HotJobs, PleaseHireMeYouBastards, and ScrewTheUnemployed, fail to garner interviews for you, and the for sale stuff ranges from questionable to someone-else’s-garbage-they-don’t-want-to-haul-to-the-street.
So the imac had all sorts of scammers and deal-makers calling/texting me. From people wanting to trade OTHER computers for it even tho the ad says I HAVE computers and this is for sale, to people wanting a 6 month payment plan on a $225 computer of which they would take possession of in exchange for a hillbilly pinky swear that they’ll get me the money. I finally had a t-shirt shop guy say he wanted it. Since I didn’t want the dude coming to my house, I offered to deliver it. I’m not going to link to his business or anything specific – don’t want to give him the traffic. But it was a crowded little shop which at first was kind of cute. He sold custom t-shirts, signs and other bullshit and he lived right behind it. His wife and him met me and we found out we were from the same state (Kansas), blah blah blah. He was 70 and recovering from from dangerous sporting venture which seemed neat that an septuagenarian who was pushing about 300 lbs. was still riding in on a dune buggy holding some weird parachute for sport.
He was real interested in all my illegal software, and turned out to be a big time libertarian. And when I say libertarian, I don’t mean the ones that you’ve heard that make a little sense. This was radio-talk-show libertarian, the kind that calls our president the “Muslim In Chief”. Sigh.
Well, he paid me my money, and offered me part time work for 9 dollars and hour under the table to which I just said “Well, okay, you know we can talk about it”. Thusly began my punishment for not being assertive. I really do think being nice and kind and not wanting to insult someone will bite you in your behind everytime.
He had some old macs and offered me a old Apple Color laser printer with toner for $50 bucks, which I almost took cause I’m STUPID. But he showed me around and his shop was crammed, floor to ceiling with everything imaginable. Thousands of egg cartons, cut outs of The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, cardboard, trash, and old electronics. He had CPUS in various states of disrepair, parts, parts and more parts, old laser printers, old injet printers, old dot matrix printers, old fax machines, parts of things I couldn’t take a guess at their origins, and so on and so on. Plus tucked away in several corners were tons of all those get rich quick, Carlton Sheets kind of books. And old macs. Just a bazillion old macs. 68xxx machines, G3s, G4s, Mac Pluses, bubble butted imacs. It was borderline psychotically surreal. Him and I were quick to make a deal that if I hauled it all off, I could have all of it for free. Famous last words.
You know the phrase “bitten off more than I could chew”. I know that phrase. Now, I know it IN SPADES. In retrospect, I should have given him 40 bucks for a tower and be done with it, but, not knowing the extent of his hoarding and his desire for free/cheap labor, I agreed and took the deal.
First of all, he had to go through everything to make sure I wasn’t getting anything valuable. He mostly failed at making sure I didn’t get any tech beyond 1998, and every once in a while, I’d shove puck mice and new working imac keyboards in the van so that this whole nightmare wasn’t a total loss. Everything was 30 lbs. and up and I hauled it all and loaded into my poor creaking van. As the day progressed, he told a story about every piece of shit he had and his main phrase was “THIS IS GOLD”. He applied this phrase to a pile of 120 coiled ADB cables, and then to a box of 12 finger track pads for 68xxx machines. I have enough power cables to give everyone in the city one. I have broken pieces of everything imaginable. I have a box of RAM. Don’t know what it goes to, don’t know how to determine what it is. I just have a flippin’ box of old ram. Nearly, what I could count 400 sticks of the shit. As I’m hauling stuff away, he’s getting more controlling and testy. At the end of nearly 4 hours, I had the van crammed with a metric FUCK ton of things the county dump won’t take. I don’t know where he got 43 56k modems in their original and aged boxes, or 21 Apple CD external SCSI drives, or, and I kid you not because I counted them, 341 old beige Apple ADB keyboards, but I think he has/had/maybe still has a serious problem with hoarding. After day one of this, I didn’t get any of the good stuff I wanted, because I think he planned it that way so I’d come back. My lower back was screaming, I was sweaty and hot, and I had listen to him berated and belittle my politics, my education, and my belief system. Lucky me.
He gave me ten dollars to come back the next day, so I was ever hopeful I’d get some shit that I wanted. There was some mirror door G4s and a bunch of bubble butt imacs that I wanted. And to be fair, I did. I got 6 bubble butts, 5 G4s, a shitload of old beige CPUs, a gianormous HP large format printer that may or may not work, at least 200 hard drives ranging from sizes 18 mb (I’m not kidding) to 500 mb, so many zip drives I could drown in them, a syquest disk reader and 20 disks, anything related to SCSI from cables to stylewriters to scanners. I have two scanners that you could land aircraft on and they are just about that heavy too. I have Apple ADB track balls and an old Apple 5.25 disk reader. I have a shit ton of performas, 7xxx series, cases, parts, handles, cabling, enough to wall us in off the porch. I also have an enormous back injury. Day two was 4 hours long and I came home with a bottle of Aleve and a six pack of Magic Hat and a pain so severe, I am typing now laying down with the laptop up ended.
I have three storage cases full of floppies and a gawd awful amount of hard drives to go through, just cause I like going through other peoples’ shit, but for right its nappy time.
But enough of the pretty prose, I have a shit ton of pictures.
