Over the past few months, I’ve spent considerable time attempting to demolish furniture and expunge unwanted detritus from my life. I have a house full of things I don’t need, thanks mainly to my propensity never to say no to anyone, and the stacks of junk are starting to impinge on my movement. There are fire-hazard piles of flattened cardboard boxes, saved and stored for a reason I can’t quite recall. There are soft furnishings I don’t need filling small rooms I can’t use, covered in boxes of magazines I’ll never read again.
Given that I also have a car and muscles, both of which are physically there but somewhat lacking in size and power, I’ve foregone the luxury of paying the council to pick up my old stuff and decided to hack it to bits myself. So far I’ve paid out far more for tools than I would have done for a council collection, and I have literally spilled blood in my attempts to render what was once solid into a fine recyclable dust of ex-furniture, but that’s not the point. I am man. I must destroy.
It’s incredible that I find sofas and shelving units – actual useful items, no less – so easy to hack to bits, whereas PCs – particularly those lovely dusty beige ones which haven’t been booted in decades – seem stuck in their corner. I can saw through a settee that has cradled my rump for many years. I can tear its cushions to bits and brute force my way through its mostly-broken springs. I can drag chunks of foam and wood down the stairs and into my car boot, flexing comically after each trip for my own amusement. But I can’t replace the CMOS battery in that Pentium 2 box, let alone take the thing for recycling.
Bits have been recycled, don’t get me wrong. There’s a big plastic container in my office that’s a filthy shrine to the sawn-off limbs of amputee machines. It’s full of graphics cards that predate DirectX, mysterious ISA cards that I can’t work out the purpose of, cables of dubious quality and function, and even The PSU of Doom. Plug in The PSU of Doom and the power for the whole house trips off. If I could bring myself to get rid of this electrical devil I would, but I can’t.
And why should I? My hoarding has been justified on many occasions. I’ve transplanted laptop screens for friends, I’ve built pointless multi-header machines with numerous optical drives, and I’ve turned trodden-on netbooks into full-blown media players for my TV. But these useful things cannot even hope to reach the majesty of Ancient Rubbish Mountain.
Even the thought of hacking the old machines to repurposable bits doesn’t appeal. I’m a child who did his growing up in the early 90’s with a Jolly Roger’s Cook Book floppy disk hidden under his bed; give me some thermite and I’d happily release some dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere. But I can’t smash my old PCs and I can’t just give them away for recycling. If I did that, those dangerous chemicals would probably be released directly into a Chinese child’s lungs, or Richard Cobbett might actually get a machine that runs Windows 95. Both of these things would leave the world a far worse place.
Years ago, I used to cover computer fairs for the pages of PC Plus. It was an odd beat; the fairs themselves had a malleable atmosphere which changed depending on the venue – be it the conference room of a hotel or a dusty sports hall – but they generally carried the same selection of goods and the same selection of traders. You’d get the social outcast pushing fag-yellowed CD-ROM drives for £30 a pop, the Asian gentleman hawking LED-swathed electronics of dubious functionality, the slimy fellow selling shareware and ‘other software’ on CD-Rs, and the genuine geek, clearing out his collection on a paste table in the corner. Could I be the latter?
No. I really couldn’t. Put aside the prospect of spending my weekends touring around computer fairs, a job I quite enjoyed as a junior reporter but not something I’d want to do on the other side of the table. I won’t do it because that’s not who I am. The reason I have so much furniture is the same reason I have so much computer kit, and the same reason I have an empty bank account at the end of every month: I’m a hoarder, so I have to have things, just for the sake of having them. I needed four sofas in my house, even though I only ever used one. And while I’ve been convinced to part with some of my stash, the computers stay. Even unbooted and useless, I will love them more than anyone else ever could.