Recycling the baby

In Fall of 1998 I got my baby: a Dell dimension desktop. It was very new, exciting, and state-of-the-art. I really did consider it my baby. It was the first big thing I'd ever bought with my own money, and it cost all of the money I had at the time!

The decision to spend all of my money on a computer was an easy one. I was starting my freshman year at Stanford, and I really wanted my own 'puter for important things like jezzball, solitaire, minesweeper, snood, email, IMing, and, oh yeah, homework. I had earned about $2,000 working in an Ecology lab at UGA that summer, just enough for a 'puter! It was my first summer job. Our parents also thought that it would be good for my sister and I to have our own computers at college, but they were refusing to get them for us since we had both decided to go to expensive schools. With an interesting twist on parental logic, they offered us the following choices:

• We could buy ourselves computers with the money we had earned over the summer. Fortunately, they realized that this would leave us with little or nothing left over, so they offered to give us an allowance in this case. Or,
• We could wait a year or two, at which time they would eventually get computers for us. However, since we had earned money over the summer, we wouldn't get an allowance.

Talk about a no-brainer! We could opt between a win-win (computer AND allowance) or a lose-lose (no computer AND no allowance). Obviously, Jenny and I both bought our own computers. And I think that perhaps we valued them more since they were the produce of our toil, so to speak.

Of course, 8 years later, that Dell desktop is a huge old clunker that hasn't been turned on in ages and is taking up space (and dust) in my room and it's boxes (yes, of course I keep the original packaging) are taking up space (and dust) in the garage. So I did what any baby deserves. I went to Starbucks, got an iced soy latte, picked up a brochure on the Starbucks/HP electronics recycling program, and signed up! Maybe it sounds a little cold-blooded to recycle the baby, but it's certainly better than trashing it! I'm so happy to have discovered the Starbucks/HP program over Christmas. It's so easy! You just sign up on their website, box up your old computer, and UPS will come pick it up to deliver to HP. It's not free (they have to pay UPS), but reclaiming my desk in an environmentally friendly way is definitely worth it!

I've been meaning to do this for a very long time. Pretty much ever since I got my (still) shiny, happy laptop two years ago. Of course, I kept the baby around for a while because it has a lot of files which maybe I'll want on it. And every now and then I would turn it on to harvest some file or other. The last time was actually a few months ago to rescue this picture. What motivated me to get rid of the baby today is the fact that I have to move out in about a month. (My landlord informed me of this a week ago. whee.) I definitely don't want to have to move that behemoth! So I decided now was the time. I probably don't really need any of the files that are on it. I'm sure I can live without the papers I wrote as an undergrad and a first and second year grad student. So I wiped it, reformatted the harddrive, and boxed it up. And oh my gosh, I have a desk again!

Good-bye, baby!