Just when you thought the MSM (main stream media) couldn’t get less newsworthy. Obviously, this guy needs to get on expensive medication, stat!
Floridian Larry Fischer has six computers A laptop, a desktop, and a server. A couple are just lying around, unplugged, fallow. He doesn’t like to delete email. His desktop is messy. He doesn’t throw away the old computers, because he doesn’t want to get rid of the files on them. “He’s what you might call,” the horribly concerned voiceover guys laments, “an e-hoarder.” Yes, you might. You might call him Captain Banana Cakes, or Sith Lord Pumpkin Pie. You might call just call him Larry. You might call him whatever you want, news show!
Except really, is Larry that different from us? Sure, he’s got some dusty old computers lying around. And he accumulates crap on them. He has 3,552 emails in his Gmail account! MY GOD. Except, I have 13,835. Am I also mentally ill? Nope! We both just use an email service with huge amounts of free storage—and computers built in the last half decade—which don’t give you any incentive to delete things. I have homework study sheets from 10th grade, history reports from 5th grade, countless stupid GIFs, a giant folder on my desktop of bookmarked articles I haven’t gotten a chance to read yet—do I deserve to have a psychologist question my ability to make decisions, like Larry? No. I rarely empty my trash either—because who cares?
I have 2 desktop PCs which I still use, a 3rd desktop PC which hasn’t been switched on in a while and a laptop, which is often used.
I had 2 drawers full of cables, connectors, adapters, etc. But I’ve been through most of it and tossed it out. And I must have a dozen flash drives, ranging from 256MB to 16GB which I rarely use unless I need to try to boot a dead PC with one.
As for “hoarding” files on my PC – I have 6 TB of storage – why would I ever delete anything?
A friend of mine still has floppies in his office. I have no idea why. He has new iMac… no floppy drive.
The last computer hard drives of mine that ended in the trash, Bin Laden’s minions put them down in a pile that was called “The Pile.” (My office had been on the 83rd floor of Tower 1…)
My other three (a G5 iMac, a G4 PowerBook and a MacBookPro,) are all still working and working and working.
My wife had gone through three PCs since 2001 and the boxes have all been recycled through a friend of mine who’s a SysAdmin.
e-waste? Hah!!
I have a 2Tb collection of stuff and every email since November of 2004, does this mean I have a problem? It is helpful to be able to pull up any conversation I may have had in the past decade. Just the other day I pulled up an email from 2007 to grab a recipe that I lost.
I simply use e-things until they fall apart, re-purposing on the way to oblivion. Desktops I build myself so good parts migrate through. I may have a record: my “testbed” Linux PC has circa-1992 keyboard. One with DIN connector (now with adapter to ps/2). Used a lot, never a problem, even better – it is best keyboard for a lot of typing I have around. Would never give it up for mushy excuses for keyboard popular these days.
This is what I call the news media’s “Health Scare Of The Day”.
Over hyped or outright manufactured “medical” bullsh!t that is quite literally part of their daily line up for the hour along with weather, traffic, etc.
Remember the SARS virus? The news media told us it was a major medical crisis. 10 people died, mainly in asia. Mad cow disease? I have yet to hear of a more than a single human case. Bird Flu! People were supposed to drop like flies in a cloud of DDT from that one. It was hard to sort the impact from normal flu.
The news media has had the “Health Scare Of The Day”, every day since at leas the year 2000. Unless OJ was on trial.
In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association this would guy would classified as a fat, lazy slob.
My maternal grandfather joined the US Army around 1930, served in China, went thru O.C.S. and was an officer during WWII in Europe. His area of expertise was supply and finance. After retiring as a Lt Colonel around 1948 he began a vigorous study of our family tree going back to the Mayflower. He kept at this until shortly before his death in 1985.
I tell you this in order for you to understand the volume of papers and books and ledgers and copies of all of the above that this man kept til his death. Filing cabinets full of documents going back to his first days in the army, directions to graveyards that contain the grave site of a 3rd cousin who died as an infant.He was very organized and methodical, but he just couldn’t throw away any of the papers.
My mother spent a week trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in his office before she gave up and called the local library and gave it all to them to sort out. Years later, when she wanted to look up documents on our distant relatives, she could easily find it there, all categorized and filed away.
So the idea of keeping a couple of terabytes of data on hard drives may seem silly, it is much preferable to keeping hard copies of nearly everything you ever came across like my grandfather did.
Yes, 11 computers, 8 of them in active use, and 4 printers.
But I really need all of them…..I really do. Don’t even talk to me about audio equipment. My wife threatened to leave me if I buy one more computer. OOOHHHH, I just saw a great deal on eBay…..
The problem with PCs is you pay top dollar for them, they become outdated, and then they aren’t worth much if anything a few years down the road.
I use them until they break down and I run out of spare parts to keep them going. Great for firewall, *nix, music jukebox, IDS, torrents.
Older machines tend to be more power hungry though, and loud as all heck. Maybe I’m just getting old but I had to relegate a server to the basement because I couldn’t take the noise from the two raptor drives any longer. SSDs are the greatest things for PCs since sliced bread.
I’m an e-hoarder. I admit it.
I back-up files I doubt I’ll ever look at again. I copied all my CDs to MP3s — even the ones I hate. The same with my movies on VHS tapes. I save old podcasts.
I _do not_ consider photo or home video collections hoarding. If anything, I wish my grandparents and parents had taken _more_ photos, not less.
The one plus side is that it takes up almost no space. I have relatives who collect physical stuff and that can fill up a whole house! All my digital hoarding occupies a few cubic feet and will probably shrink even as I collect more stuff. It still takes time, though.
If you’re reading this blog, chances are, the first question you had was “Only one server? It’s at least running Linux, right?”
I have 6 desktops and 4 laptops (about half of them are working) ranging from Cyrix 6×86 to i5 760. 9TB of space on my windows home server. I think I still have my 8088 and commodore 64 some where in storage…
I finally managed pared down to a laptop and an ARM based Linux box I use as a server. Before I had six computers, but you can really only used one at a time. I had pretty much built a rack to rackmount all my servers. Now my server is an nslu2 like dusanmal suggested I got in February of 2009.
As for files, I have over 21,000 e-mails in gmail alone and I before that I have my Eudora mail converted to mbox format on my mail server. I still save a lot of files. I have every college assignment that I ever did on a computer saved as well and all the fiction I’ve written. I dropboxed the fiction so that I won’t lose it. They probably think I have e-hoarding tendencies.
Aaron Rodgers jersey is strewn across a chair in his clean, well-kept Fort Lauderdale apartment, and a Brett Favre framed photo hangs on the wall. He’s got a Packers throw on the couch and a cheesehead doll on a shelf. He calls it his “man cave.”
http://www.refurbished-computers.ca/
Yeeeah… that’s not really hoarding, is it.
Hoarding is when you make emotional bonds to stuff and can’t throw then away because you fear losing an anchor to some idea or feeling you had at the time (which, most likely, you’ve actually lost by now). It’s when this inability to discard stuff because of a fear of cognitive disconnects hinder your every-day life that we can start to talk about hoarding behaviour.
Just keeping stuff around because there’s no point in throwing them away is not the same thing.
Also, book tip of the day on the subject: http://tinyurl.com/4xjtmhv
sounds like more manufactured
BULL to me..
seems to me they’re trying to wrap 19th century psychobabble around a 21st century lifestyle.
-and failing miserably as usual.
-s
Two laptops, one netbook, a smartphone and a tablet. Admittedly, one laptop is just functioning. I use it to download media. Nothing else.
My hoarding comes from the eight or ten old hard drives sitting on my shelf.
One of these days, I’ll back them all up on to a single backup drive.
Yeah. One of these days.
Only 3500 e-mails? WEAK. I got over 27000 email. Mostly newsletters (i.e. junk) and other stuff.
Amateurs… I have, only in my gmail account : 85378 e-mails since december 2006. Plus the archives of my older email before that.
2 laptops, 2 desktops, 1 ipad, 1 ipod touch,etc…
All working…
A few TB hard drives and lots of data / pics / movies,etc…
With a few gaps because of blown harddrives, I’ve kept every email I’ve received, every program I’ve written, and every picture I’ve taken since 1991. Hell, I probably have BBS files going back to 1980 on floppy somewhere.
I really do have hoarding tendencies, but the computer makes it much easier to keep from being buried in piles of papers. I scan or download all my monthly statements, and save all my check images. Then all that crap goes into the shredder. I’ve found it so much easier at tax time to pull receipts from a harddrive, or pull copies of deeds or legal papers or the like from my computer than ever to have to look for it in a file cabinet (which I can never keep straight).
My mother was the same as I but she did not have the technology I do. Consequently, when she died she had boxes and boxes full of bank statements, checks, tax returns, credit card bills, greeting cards, recipes, newspaper clippings, and other miscellaneous detritus of everyday life. I would keep paper copies of all this stuff too if I didn’t have data storage.
This guy sounds like most of the people I know. We have to some extent become obsessed with technology. I’ve seen managers spend half a day answering emails and not getting their work done.
People walking into poles, fountains, etc. Crashing cars and trains. Were does it stop?
Saying, “it’s part of my job” is really an excuse, than a reason.
I didn’t realize how addicted I was to technology until I retired, now I’m working hard to break that addiction. It’s a slow and painful process…
I have a friend that collects software, he never deletes anything.
To prove a point I created a 10MB file of random garbage with an executable header. He tried and tried and tried to get it to run and never did delete it.
I never did tell him the file was garbage.
I just don’t feel like lugging my several HP Laserjets (the well made ones from the 90’s) up the stairs to throw them out. Same with the several PCs I have downstairs. I cobbled them together about ten years ago, ran Linux on some, etc.
So what?
Is the network news so pathetic they have to invent disorders to scare the public with?
Yes.
If instead of old, worn out computers, he had, say, a garage full of tools to work on his car, with a couple of old cars lying around, they wouldn’t call him a hoarder, they’d offer him a show on The Discovery Channel.
I guess I’m an ehoarder but I’ve trashed a bunch of older machines.
So in other words this guy is your typical middle age Geek. And if you use Gmail then that automatically makes you an Email-Hoarder!
For sale: 1 rack mounted PDP-8 ca. 1977 with CDC Hawk 10MB hard drive, 5 fixed / 5 removable + Unix & Dec OS. Still works fine. You pay shipping.
I’m just too lazy to throw them away.
Why even post post this stupid crap? Is it merely to prove that the major media conglomerates are retards? We already know this. The whole reason why we internet aficionados visit web-blogs in the first place is to escape the brain-wave melting stupidity of traditional broadcast media. I wish not to see nor hear on my internets the same stupid crap that the mass-media pushes onto broadcast television. If I wanted that I would be looking at an actual television instead of my internet tubes. AUUGH!