I like to hold onto things, and it seems I am not alone. My wife once told me, when asked what I should do with a snazzy but non-functioning fob watch (the kind that clips to a belt look instead of going on your wrist), "I'd throw it away, but you, you like holding on to broken things." I have to admit, she was right. I do. And the depths of this insight can take me to strange places, but that is another blog post.
For this post, I recently did an inventory of the PCs in my household. There are six, yet only 3 people live here. This does not include tablets and phones and laptops, which often are used for tasks formerly carried by the sturdy, trusty desktop. I thought, I need to get rid of one or more of these. The least powerful is a Compaq Deskpro with a Pentium III (eek!) processor, a 20 GB hard drive (yikes!), 256 MB of RAM (ay caramba!) and not much else. What is this fossil doing here? It's as if I operate a home for lost and abandoned tech.
What followed was a fair bit of soul searching, about the nature of my reluctance to let things go, especially when they serve no useful purpose. As Ogion wryly points out to Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea, "What, after all, is the use of you, or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the open sea?" This is what I wrestled with. I didn't know if this old workhorse could still serve a purpose, perhaps as a Linux box, or a Primary Domain Controller in a Windows network. Reluctantly, I was able to part with a PC I will never use, having tired of trying to conjure up a practical use for something that had it still had a purpose, it would already be fulfilling that purpose. No. It had outlived its purpose. I was just too sentimental to release it and let it go.
Eventually I removed the RAM, the hard drive, the video card, the DVD-ROM drive, the dual monitor video card (does AGP even ship anymore?), and I retired the old gray mare. She truly wasn't what she used to be. Maybe pieces of her will find new purpose, but regardless, I am learning to let go, and it is long overdue.
