These Precious Things, Let Them Wash Away
After my water heater burst a few weeks ago, I went into the basement to try to clean things up and I realized that I had a Gibson Melvyn Franks R9 sitting on the floor less than a foot from standing water. Eek. Time to start rearranging the basement in earnest.
This evening, therefore, I managed to fill a 96-gallon Rumpke trash can and a Rubbermaid 55-gallon one to the brim with trash. I estimate that I'll be able to do this at least five more times over the next month. Why did I have this much trash? Well, the answer to that question is simple: it's not trash. Or, at least, it wasn't always trash. From the year 1999 to 2009 or so, I derived the majority of my income from my own consulting company. I served in capacities from janitor to CIO and earned a hilariously diverse range of compensation. Very rarely did I turn down work, and I optimized every single opportunity to make money.
Once a week or so, I'd trawl the computer recyclers and pick up "junk" in bulk. You have 50 ISA-based 3Com Ethernet cards for $29.99? I'll take 'em. They went in a storage tub in my basement, with dozens of other tubs containing odd stuff. CSU/DSU units. Remember those? Heavy-duty USR Courier commercial modems. IBM buckling-spring keyboards. Old software manuals. Thousands of individual parts.
The basement was like Heffiji's House for me: while fixing a computer for a client or building one to spec I was pretty good at remembering when I had something in the basement that I could use. Those ISA cards? I sold them at $19.99 a pop to clients who still had ISA slots. Maybe I only sold fifteen of the fifty, but that was a $270 profit. It was a rare month for me that the basement didn't yield up $500 worth of saleable parts. My favorite memory was of a bank that went out of business around 2004 and sold me 200 bags, each containing a 50-foot Cat 5 cable, for $150 cash. I sold every one of those cables over the following eight years, never for less than $19.99 and often for $29.99. Cleared well over four grand, just because I happened to be standing in the right place with the willingness to buy something in bulk.
There were certainly times I pushed a customer pretty hard, maybe contrary to their direct interests, to take something from the basement. I bought two tubs full of those USR Couriers for $5 each and then bullied a client who was building a distributed point-of-sale network into buying them from me for $139 each instead of spending the same amount on new Sportsters. What can I say? A new Kiton sportcoat is five grand or more. If you want to wear one on your first dates or during a One Lap of America, it's helpful to sell forty modems at a $134 per unit markup. And as fate would have it, the client got forced into a different system by the bank that offered them expansion financing, and the consultants from IBM threw all those modems in the trash anyway.
Another time I found a client just throwing away a bunch of "thin clients". I turned around and sold 'em at full pop to another client. The problem wasn't disposing of the high-four-figure payoff --- I redid my upstairs hallway and master bedroom in Brazilian cherry --- but getting more of the thin clients when they wanted to expand. The only distributor who still had those old pieces of crap had the nerve to charge me more per piece than I was charging the customer! He was gouging me for over retail! So if you stop by my house, you'll see that my office upstairs is still carpeted, damn it, because some of my home-improvement fund had to be returned to sender, so to speak.
I always offered a very solid warranty on basement stuff. Once in a while I'd have to take a pretty serious cash loss on replacing items that I simply couldn't find used any more. I resold a 19" Samsung monitor for a $300 profit only to see it die in the first month and turn my books $200 to the red. Those are the risks of being self-employed. I'm always surprised how many people think that working for yourself is always going to be a cost-plus thing. It isn't. It's full of days when you make twenty grand doing nothing and weeks where you work for free because you under-wrote the estimate during the sale. If you can't accept both sides of the coin with equanimity, you're better off taking an hourly job somewhere.
After my divorce, when I stopped doing a lot of independent work, the basement started to lose its value. It goes without saying that I'd stopped keeping the stock even remotely up to date. Much of the inventory that remained was ready for a second-rate Museum of Computing somewhere --- anybody up for some first-gen 3dfx Voodoo video cards? Time to start throwing it out.
But as the trash cans filled, I found more and more things that weren't just trash. The Compaq OpenVMS user manual? Surely I'd find myself in front of a VAX sometime soon, right? What about five sealed boxes of 3M 3.5" disks? Old cassette tapes, tools with no discernible modern purpose, computer mice built out of metal and thick, UV-resistant plastic to survive the apocalypse in the United States of America and featuring the very out-of-fashion DB-9 serial plug. The aforementioned Adtran CSU/DSU units, from the Golden Era of telecommunications. They're selling for $445 each on the Internet, but I don't think anybody's buying.
One hundred and fifty-one gallons of trash equals five industrial shelves clear in the basement. I wiped the mold away with rubbing alcohol. Then I moved my remarkably complete collection of Porsche Panamera to one of the shelves, noting with amusement that I haven't actually opened an issue of Panamera in more than five years. Strongly tempted to pitch that shit, but my son will want to know about the culture that spawned his 911.
Another shelf took fourteen Electra guitars in gigbags. On the top shelf, as far from the potential of flood water as it's possible to get without also leaving the basement's consistent humidity, I placed six TKL hardcases, one of them containing that Gibson R9 Les Paul whose near-death experience sparked this flurry of near-useless activity, another containing the blood-red Gibson Custom ES-339 Figured that I bought one sentimental and painful weekend in Memphis years ago. After the trash gets collected on Tuesday I'll clear out the rest of the shelf unit and some of the one next to it.
Four hours after I began, I'd come up with kind of an odd container. It was full of things that I couldn't quite bring myself to throw out. Some of it made sense --- a notepad from my old Web hosting company, a photograph I'd taken of Richard Stallman in his "Saint IGNUcius" garb some time after I met him, the Project Management Body Of Knowledge from 2000 just in case I ever have to assert my PM authority over the ex-strippers and headcases who make up the bulk of project managers nowadays. And the Compaq OpenVMS manual. The VAX is coming back, just you wait and see.
If I had any kind of personal courage whatsoever, I'd have made this motley assemblage the first stuff I threw out. But although I'm prepared to face whatever the future brings, I'm so often, too often, powerless against the past. Boats against the current. You know.