I Suck At Recycling Computers

I woke up with my grumpy pants today. The main cause for the grumpiness: the humidity. I absolutely do not function well with the humidity, in part because I radiate so much heat. The combination of my heat and the outside humidity feels awful. (I remember my trip to Hong Kong during the summer after sixth grade... and feeling that sense of... stickiness on my skin. Truly awful.) And as luck would have it, the weather here has been very humid of late. Hence, the grumpiness today.

Now naturally one might ask as to why I did not put on the air conditioning. After all, Karen and I do have central air. Apparently, it was supposed to rain today. We had figured that the rain would cool things down, which in turn would mean that we did not need the air conditioning. We were completely wrong. We waited... and waited... and waited for the rain. Well, the rain never came (at least not when we had expected it to come). So for hours upon hours, I remained cooped up in the house with the humid weather (as our windows were open).

So needless to say, I was not a happy camper. I felt lethargic, sticky, hot, thirsty... complete and absolute grumpiness. If my friend (Hot Amy) were to ever challenge me in a competition again, her best chance of winning would be during a humid day because I really cannot function in humid weather. I guess you could say it's my kryptonite.

Amid the humidity, the major highlight for today was that I was able to recycle some computers. Now, I suck at recycling computers. I have a crazy tendency to be a hoarder/tinkerer when it comes to computers. Karen makes fun of me for having so many computers in the house. And the sad thing is, the majority of the computers are not working. (Hence... the tinkering because I try to re-purpose them.)

According to my rationale, my tinkering is somewhat in line with the three R's for the environment: reduce, reuse, and recycle. (It would fall under the "reuse" category... except that I have had very little time to actually reuse them. My original intent was to reuse them. It just never turned out that way.) Sadly, I have amassed quite a collection of computers.

Rather than continue maintaining the scrap heap of old computers, I decided to do the next best thing: recycle them. Recycling is a must because computers can contain things that are detrimental to the environment and consequently need to be disposed of properly. Landfills will not do the job. That's why there is a category called e-waste... for electronic stuff.

Anyway, luckily for me the computers that are in my scrap heap collection are all Dell computers. Dell offers free recycling for all of its products. It's a very nice program. All you have to do is pack up the computer in a box, affix a label to the box, call FedEx to have the computer picked up, and that's it. Done. Once the computer is picked up and shipped off to Dell, the computer is essentially recycled and you can feel good that you helped the environment. Easy.

All you really have to do is make sure that the hard drive has been wiped clean. I actually have some cables now that can connect directly to the hard drive and make the hard drive function like an external drive. So wiping the old computer hard drives clean was an easy task to accomplish.

I had to wipe four hard drives because I was recycling two old Dell computers that each had two hard drives in them (as a result of my tinkering). As much as I enjoyed tinkering with the computers, I actually am glad that I was able to recycle the two computers today. It just freed up some space... or clutter around the house. I wasn't using the old computers, so why keep them, right? I'm sure Karen was equally thrilled.

I still have a couple of computers remaining that are in need of repair. I have yet to decide if it is worth keeping them to work on them, or if it would make sense to just recycle those as well. With my ever shrinking window of free time these days, it may make sense for the latter, but we'll see. Hopefully my amassed collection of old computers won't get too big by the time I make that decision.