This does not bode well for my productivity
For months I pondered the question of my broken Gamecube and what to do about it. I could send it in for repairs for $50 but that would mean boxing it up and shipping it out and waiting for weeks. I could buy a new one for $100 and get instant gratification. (It speaks to my extreme antipathy for mailing things that this was even a question.) Ultimately, I couldn't bear the shame of putting a console in a landfill when it was totally fixable. I sucked it up and called in to make arrangements for repairs.
But...then they told me that I could have mine fixed for $55 or I could buy a replacement for $50 and I crumbled. I bought the replacement. It just arrived today and I am back in Zelda action.
However, I still have the broken one. What to do, what to do...
One of the advantages to living in an apt building is the ability to put random stuff I want to get rid of in the hallway and it magically disappears. A couple days ago I put my old printer in the hall at 2am with a note that said "works perfectly, I just had to upgrade. Needs ink." It was gone by 4am.
If I did the same with the Gamecube, it would undoubtedly disappear just as quickly but without the cables, controller, or games and unable to read a game disk properly, it would probably still end up in the dumpster. So while I may be able to pass the shame along down the foodchain, I know that I have ultimately consigned it to a landfill based on my decision to get a replacement.
Without digressing into soul-searching about how an atheist repents for sins, I can only admit my shame in a live journal entry.
Ultimately, the system is set up such that conservation is anti-efficient. I could cry out for a leader to make conservation more friendly but that only leads me back to my fundamental sense of responsibility that if something needs to be done and no one else is doing it, I have to.
When I was a kid, my dad took a mail order course in TV and radio repair. He opened a home business in addition to his normal factory job. The course included him building his own test equipment from scratch, it culminated in building an entire TV from a kit. (He also built the housing himself. We were the first family of my acquaintence to have a push-button TV instead of the dials to change channel.)
I used to use the Tube Tester he built to identify and file the vacuum tubes from old TVs that people would give him. I remember how bad he felt when he would go on a service call only to discover that nothing was wrong with the TV, the kids had screwed up the controls. Charging $20 to just retune things seemed sinful to him.
As the years passed, he found himself more often than not telling people that it would be cheaper to replace the TV than repair it. Why? Because although he had been taught to troubleshoot the problem down to the component level and find the specific transitor, resistor, capacitor that was the problem, it became more and more difficult to replace that specific part. He found he could only buy an entire circuit board and not just the component.
He closed the business when it became obvious that his skills were obsolete.
I have experienced the same frustration in trying to maintain sound and lighting equipment. Me: "Someone dropped my DMX converter on the floor and busted off the addressing knobs. Can I buy new knobs?" Vendor: "Sure, I'll just pop some in an envelope and mail them to you." They never come. One, two, three polite emails later it is obvious: the pain-in-the-ass cost of these knobs far outstrips the monetary value of the knobs.
What are we to do? I gaze at the DVD player that has been sitting here for 6 months or so, knowing that it's just a simple component which has failed but helpless to find it and replace it. Put it in a landfill? What choice do I have? How can I find a way out of being a bad person?
The system is weighted in favor of consumption and waste. While I enjoy the idea of defying the system to do the right thing, it is no simple task. I failed and all I had to do was address and send out a package and pay an extra $5. What hope for the country as a whole?
It's times like these that I am forced to conclude that the country would be a better place if we did suffer a true depression, to teach us the value of things in a way which we have lost touch of.
It's fun playing Zelda again, though.