So it's the Saturday before Christmas and instead of wrapping anything I spent about three hours on the floor of my office going through the bottom drawer of my desk, the one that's basically become a graveyard for chargers and dongles and things I was "sure I'd need eventually." I dont know what possessed me. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe I just needed an excuse to not deal with actual holiday stuff.
Here's a partial inventory, because I know past-me would want this documented somewhere: two Micro USB cables (why), a 30-pin dock connector cable for an iPod that has not existed in this house for at least eight years, a Palm Treo charger, three different Nokia chargers with three different tips, a USB hub shaped like a hedgehog that I bought at a trade show around 2013, and — this one actually made me laugh out loud alone in my office — a CD-RW labeled "BACKUP DO NOT DELETE" in Sharpie that I have zero recollection of making.
None of it works with anything I currently own. My whole house runs on USB-C now except for one single lamp remote that takes a coin battery, and even that feels like it's living on borrowed time. I keep hearing people complain about the USB-C mandate like it was some huge imposition and I genuinely dont get it. I spent fifteen years with a drawer like the one I just cleaned out. One cable that plugs into my phone, my headphones, my laptop, and the little battery pack I keep in my bag is not tyranny, its a mercy.
Anyway. I hauled two grocery bags of dead cables and one busted external hard drive down to the electronics recycling bin at the hardware store on the corner, the one that's been there since I think 2016 and I've used maybe four times total. The guy working the counter didnt even look up from his phone when I dropped it in, which I respect honestly. No ceremony needed. Just gone.
What got me thinking, sitting there mid-drawer-archaeology, is how much of this stuff represented a genuine belief at the time that I'd need it again. The 30-pin cable wasnt clutter when I kept it, it was insurance. Same with a second Lightning cable I found, still in its plastic bag, obviously bought as backup for a phone I don't own anymore. I think tech hoarding is a specific kind of hoarding because the object always used to matter enormously and its obsolescence happens so fast and so totally that you dont notice the moment it crossed over from "useful thing" to "landfill in waiting." A wrench from 1994 still works. A charger from 2011 is a paperweight with delusions.
I did keep a few things. An old iPod Classic, the fat one, click wheel and all, because it still has 160GB of music on it that I ripped from CDs over a solid decade and never bothered to re-upload anywhere, and honestly I'm too lazy to redo that project properly even now. I plugged it in out of curiosity and it still spins up, still shows the little charging battery icon, still has an entire folder called "workout" that is deeply embarrassing content-wise. Didnt delete it. Some things you keep specifically because getting rid of them would mean admitting a version of yourself is over, and I wasnt in the mood for that on a Saturday three days before Christmas.
This blog turned fourteen last month, by the way, quietly, no post about it because I always forget until a week or two after the date passes. Fourteen years of writing about whatever gadget or annoyance or small victory happened that week, on and off, mostly on. Somewhere in an archive folder on this same computer there's a post from early on complaining about a Micro USB cable that frayed after two months. Some things really do just repeat.
The drawer's not empty now, to be clear. It never will be. I already put a spare USB-C cable and an old pair of earbuds back in there "just in case." Some habits you dont actually fix, you just change the shape of the mess.