Here’s a cool character you could become for Halloween, or for the rest of your life. It’s especially good as a post-apocalyptic or sort of “soft crash” scenario crops up in your storyline. Start collecting old electronics bits and pieces. Things like specific types of cords, cables and connectors. Go to garage sales and buy up boxes of the stuff. Most people see a pile of cables and it’s like tangleweed to them, but imagine you started collecting, and organizing this kind of stuff. Once all the Radio Shacks go out of business and no one can afford to drive out to Best Buy, they’ll be coming to you to help them set up their old VCR.
Collecting a category of objects necessarily teaches you a lot about how they work: context information. What happens if you plug this into here, and so on. It makes you an expert at something in the physical world - an object and its uses - and gives you strong hooks to gain background at your community library: another institution which I think we’ll see flourish again as things go south.
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4 Comments
Specializing in batteries of all types would be another cool post-apoc profession
See also: Obsolete Technicians Guild
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2008/01/15/obsolete-technicians-guild/
This post kinda touches on an idea I came up with recently: A cable/charger library.
Over the past several weeks I have run into a few situations where I (or one of my friends) needed a particular cable or charger. In a couple of cases I thought I had the missing link, but if I did I couldn’t find it amidst the mass of cables and chargers I own (er, hoard?).
Anyway what is needed is some place to donate all the old chargers/cables/connectors that you don’t need or even know what they are. It seems silly to throw this stuff away. Inevitably, once you get rid of something you find you could use it a few months down the line. I would love to have a place to donate this electronic ephemera that I could also rummage around in when I need something.
So, yeah, I’m with you.
I’m already there to a certain degree, although I mostly have slightly more modern stuff. Eg, I have both a laplink cable and a 1:1 parallell cable. (Or rather, simply a DB 25 male-male extension cable) And I used the laplink cable just yesterday.
Btw, have you heard about Freecycle?