Green Machine

Creative Recycling— Not a Plug

Cockroaches are nothing if not thorough and they have absolutely destroyed my old laptop. It’s easy to be upset but on the grand stage of life this crisis cannot be compared to any you’ll see on the news. It was an old computer and served me well, never asking anything in return. It was also free.

So I find myself in a unique situation. I’ve recently purchased a G4 Powerbook from a reliable refurbisher/reseller operating out of San Jose through eBay. However I used my work account because we had a coupon that saved me fifty bucks and I’ve written a check to my job that hasn’t been cashed yet. The computer is either in San Jose getting packed up or is in between being roughly handled by someone with a secure job and little to lose. My old laptop is with my boss who had his boyfriend pry it apart in an effort to rescue my harddrive (no luck) and I’m operating a loaned IBM ThinkPad (thanks, Keith) after discovering that my old G3 Desktop can barely handle Gmail.

The fact that a computer from the 90’s still works isn’t surprising and I would have no problems with my old reserve except that it has been outpaced by development. In many ways the old desktop is a superior computer– it frequently runs faster than either of the laptops in my life and it never has problems with different programs interfering with one another; the problem is that everything operates on new programs that don’t run on the older computer. I could hook it up to an office network and use printers, type up reports and run spreadsheets as efficiently as anyone with a computer half its age.

When I was twenty I worked on the internet, specifically for a company called NextMonet which sold “contemporary fine art” online. The business model was horrible but very en vogue at the time– get investment capital and spend all of it on things you don’t need. There was the programmer corner, the writer’s room and the main room was split between various functions; everyone had their own work station and new computer and everyone spent a lot of their time using about 10% of what had been issued them to do their jobs. The writers honestly could have used typewriters but they demanded special lighting and chairs to write little sonnets describing the crap for sale. Shockingly the upside-down pyramid financial plan ended in tears for everyone and layoffs eliminated the writing staff, then half of the main office. I dismantled all of the IKEA office furniture I had assembled and moved around, then was laid off after NextMonet was absorbed by another company.

It was obviously a poor way to run a company but what lingers most in my mind is how much technology is wasted. Subsequently I worked for a large corporate law firm that was similarly stocked with top of the line computers for everyone, staffed by a crew of legal aides who had no idea how to use them and who essentially wasted an entire computer to check their e-mail when they left their Blackberry at home. This was a major company, a well respected (in the business world) firm, but there was no need for every employee to have fancy computers. However the firm had to update their systems frequently because as new software was developed new computers needed to be able to process the applications. The development of technology was driven by an understandable enthusiasm but the result was lost, and continues to be lost, on most people.