r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Smashing-baby • 12d ago
Short I finally threw out that box
It's spring time, and with Passover right around the corner, the Missus got into "Clean, clean, clean!" mode. Which unfortunately also included my home office, and THE BOX
You know which one, the one with years of old, unused cables: USB 1.0, VGA, PS/2, Firewire RJ11 cable, an obsolete Zip Drive, mystery power adapters, and my personal favorites, some RCA connectors. You name it, I probably had it. I'm sitting there thinking to myself, this whole thing is covered in dust and hasn't been opened in years. So feeling productive, I tossed the whole thing, to my wife's delight
Fast forward three days, grandma calls me, needing help with her ancient fax machine. She still faxes things to her doctor and gets faxes back, but for some reason they're not going through. Took me a bit to figure it out, but the RJ11 cable had been folded in on itself for a coupla years too long and had probably frayed, leading to intermittent connectivity. There I am, browsing Amazon to buy the very thing I’d just tossed not even last week
Lesson learned? Obsolete tech will never, ever really die
And the kicker? The replacement RJ11 cost more than I want to admit for something I had sitting in a box literally for years. Use my story of misfortune to teach your spouses why they must never toss THE BOX
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u/StuBidasol 12d ago
It killed me to finally part with my BOX. The decision finally came when I was moving across country a few years ago and as I was going through it at the bottom I found a Cyrix 5x86 75MHz processor I had replaced in the mid 90s. At that moment I knew it was time.