I never throw anything away

[Red Green]

Oren wrote in news: [e-mail]:

The jealousy will kill me. But some day he too will fall from glory...as all competitive heros do .

[gfretwell]

This is the shed(s) actually 2 back to back. The bricks are pavers dumpsterdived from my wife's construction dumpsters and the back shed is block and steel scavenged from the same place.

I will open the doors and shoot pictures if you want. on the side is a bunch of roof tile and more pavers

The steel doors and glass block in the back shed were scavenged too.

[Robert Green]

That was very similar to the case of Homer and Langley Collyer.

Langley was suspected in the death of his brother and was the subject of a huge manhunt after his brother's body was discovered when neighbors complained about an unpleasant odor. It turned out he had died a few weeks before, killed by a booby trap of newspapers he had made to keep thieves out. His blind and invalid brother Homer also died soon after Langley, who had been caring for him. The newspapers of the time kept running articles about the supposed treasure trove the brothers had in their mansion which inspired near nightly raids on their house. Hence the booby traps, which like so many other such traps, ending up trapping its maker and not the criminals it was intended for.

Hoarding is an affliction that seems to bother observers a lot more than it does the hoarder. In many cases, when there is an "intervention" the hoarder either quickly restocks the hoard or dies very soon after from the incredible stress of watching stuff (mostly junk) that they've come to treasure, being dumped in the trash. Just imagine how you would feel if someone came in and threw out most of your belongings? In the case of hoarders, they attach great value to things you and I would consider junk. So, to them, it's as if someone came in and junked their big screen TV, their tools, their clothes, etc.

It's thought to be an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but its causes, treatment and cure are still quite elusive. I save stuff because once I have something, and know where it is, it becomes part of my brain. Throwing it out seems to be like deliberately forgetting something. Many of the hoarders I've seen are quite intelligent and well aware of their "problem" and show very little interest in changing their ways. There's a hierarchy of hoarding listed here:

I am not quite sure where I stratify, but I think it's level II (or maybe III).

-- Bobby G.

[ktos]

"Robert Green" wrote in news:ic4qgr$ggv$ [e-mail]:

Though not common, it happens more than you think.

[Robert Green]

I used to give away the old machines, but it turned out to be a bad idea. I became the technical support for such machines, and a common complaint was "They won't play " I would tell the parents that's a GOOD thing, because kids will be using the machines for schoolwork and not game playing. Didn't matter.

I finally gave up after one person kept installing animated cursors and boatloads of some of the seediest looking PD shareware garbage that slowed an already slow (200MHz PII) down pretty seriously. It was still absolutely fine for schoolwork, running Quicken, making Powerpoint presentations, etc. I ran for years doing programming and WP - had an AST TurboLaser board and laser that went with it (that's about the time HP won the laser printer wars). I told them that at the time, the machine and laser printer were still worth at least $700 and they were over $6000 new. Something just slightly faster from Circuit City would cost at least $1000 and wouldn't come with a laser printer or any service other than "you need to reformat and reload."

One day, when I realized I hadn't heard from them in a while, I called only to find out that they had "junked it" and as far as I could tell, they were still having the same old problems with their new Circuit City computer, multiplied by 10 because now they were on the Internet and corresponding with Nigerian Princes with slight banking problems. (-:

And that's why there are 19 PC's stacked in the basement. Less trouble for me to hang on to and possibly be able to restore an Email from 15 years ago if I ever needed to. I stopped doing almost all my tech support efforts after that, figuring that the old saw was right "no deed goes unpunished." I am kind of looking forward to seeing which ones will start up after a

5-15 years nap. I'm betting it won't be many. My laptop collection has not fared well without exercise. The New Year's resolution that I would exercise them lasted about as long as they all do. Some beep, some don't and some have their CMOS backup batteries located in impossible to service places

-- Bobby G.

[dgk]

I also have a wall of beige in the basement. Luckily it really doesn't take up much room since it's only 6" thick or so. I could probably just pull all the drives, copy all the data onto a tiny sliver of a spare 1tb drive, and get rid of them all. But they do no harm sitting there. One is a 450 that I overclocked to 500. One is a 120. Somehow I doubt I'll ever need them again.

[Jules Richardson]

Yeah, I keep pretty much everything. I've got my scrap wood piles, my scrap metal piles, my scrap electronics pile etc. - I manage to keep it pretty well sorted (with different piles for different size things, too), and am lucky in that I've got a few sheds and big storage areas. It's surprising how often I dig into them to fix something that's broken.

The frustrating thing is that I moved overseas a few years back, and still have similar piles in (free, thankfully) storage abroad - I keep putting off the day when I suspect I'm simply going to have to dump them. Plus it's really annoying when I know that I have something that I could use to fix something else, but it's 4000 miles away (the electronics are the worst for that - I'm not in a high-tech area here, but I've got boxes and boxes of scrap/salvaged components in overseas storage)

cheers

Jules

[Red Green]

[e-mail] wrote in news: [e-mail]:

I see you learned well from the 3 little pigs. Brick. How did you get in on the DIY show unlimited landscape budget?

(really is a decent shed)

[aemeijers]

On 11/19/2010 8:39 AM, dgk wrote: (snip)

My other living room and 3rd bedroom resemble that remark. Glad to see I'm not the only one.

[krw]

Did anyone ever look for Jimmy Hoffa in there?

[krw]

That's no problem. Just cut it and it'll be like any other piece of lumber (after a cut).

[gfretwell]

No but I have one of his ashtrays.

[Robert Green]

How cool is that!?

Someone, somewhere has something made out of the *real* Jimmy Hoffa. I'm sure whoever "did the job" on po' ol' Jimmy took a "proof of kill" souvenir or two. Sometime in the future, someone will find his shriveled dick, finger or ear in a baggie in someone's attic. Don't laugh, Napoleon's penis is floating around:

-- Bobby G.

[Steve B]

Dang, as a 37 year Teamster, I'd buy that if I ever saw one for sale.

Steve

[gfretwell]

My mom worked for the international and was the head of the admin staff that supported his legal team in Chattanooga. I used to see Hoffa pretty often at the HQ building.

[Red Green]

[e-mail] wrote in news: [e-mail]:

And all I have a gizmo made out of the recycled steel from the World Trace Center.