e-recycling ...

If you're in the geek trade you inevitably acquire a lot of high tech junk, you know, the old laptop you havn't used for a couple of years, the other old dead laptop you bought to cannabilize to keep the first one going, the old desktop you thieved the memory and disk out of long ago, the inevitable old crt monitors, the old sun machine you brought home from work in a moment of weakness, various dead printers and on and on and on.

And of course these days employers love you to take this stuff home because it costs them money to dispose of end of life stuff these days, between twenty and thirty bucks for crt and about the same for a laptop.

In one sense that's why Canberra is such a good place to pick up old machines - government agencies sends stuff to auction all the time in the desperate hope that some loon will buy it and the money they make might just pay the disposal costs of the useless junk.

Certainly, when I had to get rid of a pile of stuff from a failed project that's exactly what I did, seeded to junk to be disposed of with enough stuff that was saleable to get the disposal company to take the lot.

But I digress.

Basically I had a pile of junk in my garage that was going to cost me a couple of hundred bucks to dispose of, so when the ACT government organised a free high tech junk disposal day in partnership with Apple I jumped at the chance, and filled my car boot with various dead things. What I hadn't counted on was that another thousand or two people also had garages full of junk, so this morning I found myself in a line of cars queuing to get into the disposal centre.

The operation was as slick as could be. Four or five big shipping containers, and a crew of guys (and gals) that never stopped, helping take kit out of people's cars and trucks, stacking it, and a couple of people directing traffic, including a couple of guys out on the road managing the queues and helping through traffic get through.

Pretty impressive. Only trouble is, now you've cleared out the junk, you start finding other things that should've gone. Next time ...