Elisa's Blog
Friday, November 04, 2005
 
Huh.

So my company is in the process of moving to a new office. Of course this then produces a frantic panic among the engineers what with trying to fit the packing of their prized possessions, toys, the loads of junk and experimental unfinished projects in the labs, the personal documents, tidying up unsaved software work, etc, all the while trying to cram in the usual work hours, so the office these days is a hubbub of activity.

Right outside my cube is a huge 3-meter cubed box labeled "TRASH". 2 hours ago, one of the managers came by and dropped 5 or 6 CDs worth of commercial software in there. By now, the box is almost full, containing, as said manager pointed out, over $100,000 dollars worth of equipment, including: 3 debuggers, several computer keyboards, a fully functional 4 MHz analog oscilloscope, 2 survey-grade GPS receivers, assorted serial and antenna cables, antennas, chipsets, and various other electronic parts, most of them, though old, still perfectly functional.

An old friend of mine just recently mentioned to me that he was glad that he lived in a plastic, "throw-away" society. I can see his point: if one is able to live in a society where the cost of buying something new is less than the cost of repairing something old, or the profits gained from selling something you no longer need is smaller than the savings in transportation, time, and effort you'd get from just throwing the unneeded stuff away, then one is living rather well off indeed.

Still, that was not enough to prevent me from staring wide-eyed and incredulous at the huge box outside my cube.

And I thought about Mexico.


- posted by Elisa @ 4:55 PM
Comments:
Yes -- exactly what I thought, too, upon the happenings associated with the company I work for... and their piling discards that are like mounds and mounds of treasure.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : Mon Nov 07, 02:27:00 PM PST
 
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