So it's the third week of January and I finally did the thing I say I'm going to do every single year around this time, which is dig out the drawer. You know the drawer. Bottom drawer of the desk, the one that doesn't close all the way because it's stuffed with cables and dead phones and chargers for devices I no longer own. Every January 1st I tell myself "this is the year I sort that out" and then it's the 20th and I've usually only gotten as far as opening it, wincing, and closing it again.
This year I actually went through it. Took about ninety minutes with a coffee going cold next to me and a garbage bag on one side, a "maybe" pile on the other. Here's what I found, roughly in order of how embarrassed I am about it:
- Three Micro USB cables, none of which charge anything I own anymore
- An iPhone 6s with a cracked screen that still, somehow, turns on and shows 41% battery
- A Fitbit Charge from what I think is 2017, band disintegrated into that sticky rubber goo old wristbands turn into
- Two USB flash drives, 8GB and 16GB, one of which I plugged into my current laptop and it doesn't even have a port that fits it anymore without a dongle
- A tangle of earbuds with the little foam tips, wired, from the era when wired earbuds were just what earbuds were
- Four adapters for chargers whose original brick I no longer have, so the adapters are pointless on their own
The iPhone 6s thing got me thinking honestly. That phone came out in 2015. It is eleven years old and it still boots. I plugged it in overnight out of curiosity and by morning it was sitting there showing me a lock screen from whatever year I last used it as a backup device, some photo of a hiking trip I don't fully remember taking. Meanwhile my current phone, which I've had for maybe fourteen months, already nags me about storage and battery health being at 91%. I'm not going to pretend I have some grand unified theory about planned obsolescence here, people smarter than me have written entire books about it, but sitting there holding an eleven-year-old phone that still works better than it has any right to, next to a stack of dead fast chargers for phones that don't exist anymore, does put a certain feeling in you.
Anyway. The actual point of writing this post isn't the nostalgia trip, it's that I went looking for where to actually take this stuff and it was more annoying than it should be. My city does have an e-waste dropoff, but it's only open Tuesdays and Thursdays until 4pm, which if you have a normal job is basically never. There's a Best Buy about twenty minutes from me that takes small electronics for free, no receipt needed, and that's genuinely the easiest option, so that's where the bag is going this weekend. If you're in a similar spot and didn't know that, most of the big electronics chains will take cables, small gadgets, and old phones off your hands even if you didn't buy them there. Worth checking before you just toss things in the regular trash, which I'll admit I've done in the past out of pure laziness and which I'm not proud of.
I kept exactly three things from the whole drawer: a Lightning cable (still useful, I have an old iPad that uses it), one of the flash drives (16GB one, because you never know), and the Fitbit, which is going straight in the trash the second I find the little pry tool to get the battery out separately since apparently you're not supposed to just chuck lithium batteries in with regular e-waste either. Learned that one this week too.
The 6s I'm actually keeping, unsentimentally, as a backup device to run one specific old app I use for a very niche hobby that never got updated for newer iOS and stopped working on my main phone two updates ago. Sometimes the old thing just does the one job better because nobody bothered to ruin it with updates. That's basically my whole personality when it comes to software lately, if I'm honest. Give me the boring stable version that just works over the flashy one that changes its UI every quarter.
Drawer's empty now except for the three keepers and a phone charger cable I'm pretty sure is for something but I genuinely cannot identify what. It's staying in there. Every drawer needs one mystery cable. That's just how it works.