The Hardware Graveyard!

[Calum]

in my new job i see an awful lot of peripherals being chucked. so far in six days i have thrown out about a half dozen old (but okay) logitech ps/2 mice, and one UTP flylead, which i suspect works fine.

the thing is, this is a waste, but if i were to 'save' all this stuff, i could not use it! what am i going to do with dozens of mice and UTP cables?

any ideas what i could do to stop the waste and do something useful with this kit?

ta......

[KernelPanic]

I was thinking the same thing not so long ago (I think i posted it). It really is a problem, and it hurts me everytime I see companies chuck hardware  

[sporkme]

when i worked for compaq, building servers, if there was a problem with the motherboard (like bad power to the agp slot) they would just trash the board, possibly the video card, possibly a lot of other peripherals too.

if you cut yourself and bled a little into the case, the whole thing was trashed... board, ram, processor... whatever you had in there.

if a case had a scratch on it, and paint would not cover it up enough, they would trash it

if you dropped a hard disk six inches, they would not even test it... just chuck it in the dumpster.

i have seen thrown out:
-like 20 pentium 900 xeons
-a gig of rambus
-14 10k rev 32gb scsi drives and the fiber-optic -bank they were in
-a bunch of geforce 4 (brand new at that time) because of possible ESD damage

all of this equipment could have been good, and something like a hair in the processor slot or some oddball thing could have beed to blame

the kicker: you couldn't have any of it, and it was trashed in padlocked dumpsters.

they hit you with a metal detector at the door.  a guy got arrested for trying to jack some ram

[Calum]

what a bunch of cunts! i suppose that if they let people take the stuff away, they could not claim insurance. they could just have open skips instead of locked ones and turn a blind eye though in my opinion...

so anyway, my dept is really just peripherals, not internal stuff, mice, cables, PCMCIA modem cards, mobile phone accessories, laptop power supplies and so on, and i could definitely take some written off ones away, but what would i bloody do with them? any suggestions?

[voidmain]

sporkme, I can understand their policies of not letting the workers have the "damaged" equipment. Otherwise, if I worked there, I'd be bleedin' on lots of mother boards, and droppin' many a SCSI drives.

[Calum]

oh yeah! i never thought of that! i suppose i'm just too honest!  :rolleyes:  

well they're still a bunch of cunts!  

[TheQuirk]

You could sell them on ebay or donate them to your local school/charity.

Or send them to me          

[ September 03, 2002: Message edited by: TheQuirk ]

[Calum]

send a box of mice to texas! i reckon it might cost more than the mice!

i suppose i could do those things. i think i might saturate the market in schools and charities though, maybe i'll have to set up a paypal account and sell them on ebay right enough. seems a bit of a hassle though, i've never been enamoured with this ecommerce business...