My stuff owns me

Over the course of my adult life, I've ended up with a lot of things, from old picture albums, to old tech items (2 meg DIMM anyone?). I hold onto some of it for sentimental reasons, and some of it for 'just in case' reasons. After all, who knows when I'll need that x486 laptop, that I can't even load an OS on at this point, because the 3.5 inch floppy drive destroys floppy disks, instead of reading them?

A couple months ago, I read a post about how our stuff owns us. How every time we look at an item, and try to decide what to do with it, we use up our precious energy doing so. So I actually followed the column's advice and just threw out a bunch of obsolete computer cables, 40 meg hard drives and sound cards. I didn't really make much of a dent, as a lot of stuff just felt useful to me, but now when I need a part for a computer, I'm much more likely to actually to find it in my box o' parts downstairs.

Then a few days ago, I decided to start weaning myself off of purchased cable television nd shopped around for an s-video cable to connect my computer to the television. The first one I found was 25 feet long, and only 10 dollars, but I though 'nah, I'll drive to the store. It can't be much more expensive there.' After visiting 3 stores, I found a 25 foot cable, but they wanted 45 dollars for it. So I drove home, did another search, and found a similar gold-plated cable for only $2.08. I ordered it, and for a measly $2.99 S&H I'll be receiving that cable in a couple of days.

This was exciting to me, but it wasn't the first time I got a great deal on the internet. I mentioned it to my wife, and she said "That's why the economy is in the toilet". So since I paid about one tenth of what I would have paid in a store for this item, I devastated the economy. But on the other hand, since I got a cable that was most likely either used, or bought in lots after some computer store went bankrupt, it's probably a limited resource that won't be replenished. Had I bought it from the store, I would set in action a chain of events (low inventory, re-order, make cable, ship to cable to store) that would have consumed quite a bit of resources.

It's an understood rule in our society that, if I haul a bunch of stuff out to the curb, and just leave it there, people will scavenge through it, and take what they want, thereby relieving me of stuff that isn't worth storing, but still useful. It's the trite-but-true $15 furniture set nearly every American child gets when they move out of the parents' house.

This reminded me of a 'tool co-op' idea that I had heard about on npr a couple of years ago. Basically, as a man gets older, he slowly collects tools. Hammers, power saws, power washers, miter box etc. Each of these tools usually sees a period of usefulness of about 15 seconds over its life. The idea of a tool co-op is that you would borrow tools from a community tool set, so that they would get more of a use, rather than sit in the garage for years for every minute of actual use. He may think of passing them on to a son when he dies, but the generation gap is usually too big to bother. My dad, for example, is still using his tools, and will be for another 20 years, at which point I'll have a set of tools for myself. Hence, no need to pass it down.

So what is the point of this article? Maybe it's ok to sell stuff on amazon or ebay at a discount, or at a break-even price, in order to just be rid of it. If I ever need that gewgaw again, I can always re-buy it from the community co-op that is ebay, probably for a great discount, especially if we all throw away the concept of owning a full set of tools by the time we die, or of having a box full of computer parts from the early nineties. Reselling these items at a discount will keep someone who needs whatever you're selling from buying a brand new one, and it keeps stuff out of landfills unless it is truly broken.

Of course, re-using stuff, rather than sending it to the landfill, does hurt the consumer economy. Cell phone companies make a lot of money because we all have a drawer full of used phones, that outlived their usefulness to us, but aren't actually broken. People get rid of old cars well before they are actually worn out, buy new cars off the lots, and pay crazy amounts of interest for the 'new car smell'. It seems that we have a lot of disposable income, and we are more than willing to dispose of it. But what if we were to start buying stuff cheap, spending 5 dollars for a 45 dollar cable and such? Would we no longer need to get those big paychecks? Could we cut down on the very size of our houses, so that we could stop making huge mortgage payments, or empty out that 'storage room' downstairs, and rent it out to a college student instead?

More expensive cell phones typically come with a 'lock' code on them, so that they can only be used by a certain vendor. Typically though, you can get them 'unlocked', if you can present a case that you are going to use them overseas. I went through the process of unlocking a Treo 650 a couple of years ago, because my cell phone provider wasn't something I could choose at the time. With a couple of google searches, I found someone who would unlock the phone for $300. I kept looking though, and finally found a company that would unlock it for $15. I stopped searching then and bought the unlock code, but I've always wondered; if I had kept searching, would I have found a site that would have done it cheaper? Essentially I 'named my price', what I thought it was worth to unlock the phone, but I don't believe I got the best possible deal. In fact, if I had called the cell company, they probably could have been talked into unlocking it for free, since my employer almost immediately paid for me to get internet access on this phone, for which they paid $39.99 per month.

I'm a little scatterbrained today, so I might come back and edit this article for clarity, but the general idea, "Caleb is a cheapskate" is pretty evident, I think.