To Give Some Idea…

Just how bad the issue of the big client using my old office for storing defunct equipment out of site and mind, for disposal someday, which now will not involve me, there are 43 monitors.  Forty-three.  Most of which are genuinely dead or may as well be, and most of which are 14” or 15” models.

That doesn’t count computers or carcasses thereof (in some cases nothing more than an empty case, or a case with a motherboard and CPU), which is probably a similar number, keyboards, mice, and stray hard drives.  I had forgotten, but we still had all the hard drives from when we upgraded everyone in early 1999.  Anyone with a drive under 1 GB got a 4.3 GB drive and everything reinstalled, less than a year after we had upgraded most of those same machines to Windows 95, because it was considered too costly and unnecessary to buy new machines.  So there’s a large stack of smaller than a gig drives, usually 250 or 800 MB, some still labeled with whose machine they came from, in case.

It’s something.  And I’m late late late, but I finally got one entire room completely clear of anything that was ours.  Except the patch panel and a framed Monet print.  If someone rents and wants a network, the panel is good to go.  If not, the whole thing culd be stuffed up into the ceiling, again for future reference as it’s perfectly good wiring a former partner and I installed, and my brother extended and modified (we had male ends straight to a hub; he switched to the patch panel).  The room echoes now.  I couldn’t move things in the rain, but I got massive amounts done and stayed a bit late.  The other room is almost clear as well.  While I know it deceives and will take more than the couple hours I picture, it’ll be relatively fast to finish off the whole thing.

The room that’s empty is the main one we used, so it’s especially strange.  Actually, I think I was starting to say it’s not empty, but what’s there is not ours.  There are nine monitors and at least fourteen computer carcasses at one end of the room.  There are 20-something computer carcasses in the hall, along with 28 of the monitors.  The rest is and will probably remain in the other room.  That includes a few retired servers.

I was puzzling over the whole arrangement of their stuff ending up in our office, to the point where it took up about $200 a month of our space.  It started when my partner cleaned out their server room to make it actually usable, and continued because we worked on their machines in our office, so naturally it was where stuff ended up.  It took time to get out of hand, and then became something not to rock the boat over, and then became something I kept putting off after they said they’d pay to have it hauled away.

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