* Illustration: Martin Venezky * My brothers and I didn't know Dad had a problem. We knew he had an insanely large collection of computers and related paraphernalia. I was living in Washington, DC, and somehow Alex and Andrew, back home in Seattle, had failed to notice that Dad could barely move around his apartment and was navigating from room to room via narrow, oyster-gray corridors formed entirely by PC towers.
But now it all had to go. His building was being demolished. Dad had to be out in three months. Alex and Andrew called me for assistance.
The biggest problem, they told me, wasn't just volume.
In ecofriendly Seattle, garbage collectors won't take computer hardware — filled as it is with PVC and phthalates. Dad persisted in holding on to the notion that somewhere out there was a charity desperately in need of a half ton of mid-1990s computers. It was not the case.
I did what I could to help coordinate. Alex posted an ad on craigslist for a two-day event: "Huge stash of PC equipment, for free or for a dollar." He was in charge of our online strategy because he knows nothing about computers. He could lure people in with jazzy, noninformational emails. "Yes, they work," he wrote to one mark. "Most of them. Picture the scene inside the Jawa sandcrawler in Star Wars, with all the obsolete droids."
Dad's landlord let them borrow a vacant apartment upstairs, a cramped one-bedroom with dirty carpeting and a sticky kitchenette. They filled it. Tupperware bins overflowed with cables. Scanners, monitors, and printers claimed the corners. Dad rubber-banded software and drivers to sundry peripherals.
It was an emotional time: We were trying to transfer stuff from Dad — a nut we know and love — to a bunch of nuts we neither knew nor loved. One man immediately called his wife in a paroxysm of excitement. When he told her to bring an additional vehicle for hauling, it seemed our savior had come. Then she exercised her veto.
Dad took the whole thing pretty well. He chatted with fellow hoarders about the best places to score unopened Windows 95s, and he hid a few favorite pieces. He still rents two storage lockers, at $127 a month each, for the stuff "too valuable to throw away." My brothers probably set aside a few items, too. Judging by their bedrooms and car trunks, Dad's behavior might be genetic.
After two days of solid crowds, there was still too much crap. I phoned every e-waste hauler in Washington state before I found Computer Equipment Resources, out of Carnation. A guy named Vince met Dad and my brothers on the appointed day.
At first, everyone, including Vince, observed this weird, unspoken protocol that they were to handle the equipment as fragile objects of considerable worth. By the end of the day, even Dad was hurling monitors into the back of the truck and listening to them crack. The bill was $630, which my brothers and I split. Dad is chronically broke, a condition likely not unrelated to his stashing disorder.
He was always a collector. When I interviewed him for this story, he told me that in the mid-'70s he owned 25 Volkswagen Bugs, which he kept parked on San Francisco streets. That made me think of Alex's accumulated Japanese model kits, so I asked my brother how he knew he would never turn into a hoarder like Dad.
"The short answer? I don't," Alex said. "But the stuff I collect is actually worth something. Some of the Super Nintendo games I have are worth, like, 60 bucks."
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