The Art of Looting
I love summer. I love the weather, the atmosphere, the weeks of possibilities stretching out before me, the end of school, the excuse to buy stuff on eBay because no good games come out. But, and I may change this opinion once the holidays start, the best thing is quite possibly the last few days of school.
Those few short days, punctuated by sports activities and rehearsals and all manner of events, when everything is winding down. I love the feeling of having nothing to do, I love just being able to spend time with friends, I love relaxing and doing all the fun things I've wanted to do all term like playing that The Simpsons Scalextric track in the Physics lab or discovering why there has always been a copy of SimCity 2000 in the Computing room. But most of all, I love the looting.
You see, it's over the summer that any renovations are done to most schools and my school is no different. Having systematically been upgrading the computers systems into the 21st century, Wellington is now completely redoing the computer labs, seperating the rooms out and adding more computers to both. Naturally, this requires that the rooms as they are now be cleared. This in turn requires the removal of all the miscellaneous crap that builds up on shelves over the years.
Sam made it out of the lesson with many hours worth of early 90s educational videos, a bunch of old Mac software, a copy of Windows 95 (again, all floppy disks) and the motherboard for an early Macintosh. Jimerson, another friend, picked up a heatsink, a hard drive and the keyboard to a BBC Microcomputer. I wrestled the keyboard off him (thwarting his plans to use it for his 360 on the grounds that he couldn't break it any further) adding it to the long-defunct husk of a Microcomputer that I had already acquired.
I also came away with a couple of years worth of magazine demo discs, several textbooks including ones on Pascal and COMAL coding which I may actually use, what I think might be RAM expansion for either the BBC or a Mac, a Lego Technic kit, 3 hard drives, a copy of SuSE linux 8.1, an animation package for Macs (the school used a lot of Macs, back in the day) and a Hewlett-Packard cassette drive.
Tomorrow, I intend to add the aforementioned SimCity game to my bag o' swag along with some other games. Hopefully, I'll also get my hands on a Mac that's been sitting in the Physics lab for years. Sam, Skippy and I spent Physics examining it, in between bouts of Scalextric (marred by a jackass in my class whom I shall refer to only as "Piddle"), and we hope to get it working tomorrow. Between us, we're taking every piece of 20th century IT that isn't nailed down or plugged in.
All in all, a good days haul. I love sifting through old rubbish like that, trying to find hidden gems that are perhaps still useful or that perhaps simply provide comedy and nostalgia value. The mad scramble for the best obsolete parts merely heightens the adrenalin rush that one gets when one carries a "Hewlett-Packard SureStore T20" out of school under one's arm, with one's friends and sister trailing behind, equally laden with glorious, useless tat.
That, my friends, is the art of looting.
Those few short days, punctuated by sports activities and rehearsals and all manner of events, when everything is winding down. I love the feeling of having nothing to do, I love just being able to spend time with friends, I love relaxing and doing all the fun things I've wanted to do all term like playing that The Simpsons Scalextric track in the Physics lab or discovering why there has always been a copy of SimCity 2000 in the Computing room. But most of all, I love the looting.
You see, it's over the summer that any renovations are done to most schools and my school is no different. Having systematically been upgrading the computers systems into the 21st century, Wellington is now completely redoing the computer labs, seperating the rooms out and adding more computers to both. Naturally, this requires that the rooms as they are now be cleared. This in turn requires the removal of all the miscellaneous crap that builds up on shelves over the years.
Sam made it out of the lesson with many hours worth of early 90s educational videos, a bunch of old Mac software, a copy of Windows 95 (again, all floppy disks) and the motherboard for an early Macintosh. Jimerson, another friend, picked up a heatsink, a hard drive and the keyboard to a BBC Microcomputer. I wrestled the keyboard off him (thwarting his plans to use it for his 360 on the grounds that he couldn't break it any further) adding it to the long-defunct husk of a Microcomputer that I had already acquired.
I also came away with a couple of years worth of magazine demo discs, several textbooks including ones on Pascal and COMAL coding which I may actually use, what I think might be RAM expansion for either the BBC or a Mac, a Lego Technic kit, 3 hard drives, a copy of SuSE linux 8.1, an animation package for Macs (the school used a lot of Macs, back in the day) and a Hewlett-Packard cassette drive.
Tomorrow, I intend to add the aforementioned SimCity game to my bag o' swag along with some other games. Hopefully, I'll also get my hands on a Mac that's been sitting in the Physics lab for years. Sam, Skippy and I spent Physics examining it, in between bouts of Scalextric (marred by a jackass in my class whom I shall refer to only as "Piddle"), and we hope to get it working tomorrow. Between us, we're taking every piece of 20th century IT that isn't nailed down or plugged in.
All in all, a good days haul. I love sifting through old rubbish like that, trying to find hidden gems that are perhaps still useful or that perhaps simply provide comedy and nostalgia value. The mad scramble for the best obsolete parts merely heightens the adrenalin rush that one gets when one carries a "Hewlett-Packard SureStore T20" out of school under one's arm, with one's friends and sister trailing behind, equally laden with glorious, useless tat.
That, my friends, is the art of looting.
posted by Alasdair Corbett at
9:07 PM
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