Ever want to Office Space some old equipment?
November 12, 2019 5:01 PM   Subscribe

 
We did a "copier smash" as a fundraiser. Took the glass and the messy bits out of a few old copiers, put them on an old tarp, gave people safety gloves, glasses, and a face shield, handed them a sledge hammer, and for a dollar a swing, they could go to town on a copier. Raised a lot of money for local charity that day. ;)

Once, when we were hauling some old decommissioned copiers to the dump, I'd offloaded a couple off the truck, and a guy walks over. "You're tossing these?" he asked. "Yup." He got the most wicked grin on his face and started kicking the shit out of the copiers. Pushed them over, grabbed a nearby piece of pipe and started thrashing them. He comes over to me, panting but clearly thrilled. "You should sell tickets, man. This is better than therapy." Way ahead of ya, brother.
posted by xedrik at 5:08 PM on November 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


Looks like somebody at Fark's got a case of the Mondays!

Your dog wants small scraps of aluminum
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:18 PM on November 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


You should probably do that to your old hard drives at least.
posted by sjswitzer at 5:33 PM on November 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


It was not uncommon for students to toss old computer equipment scheduled for disposal off the second floor balcony onto the concrete drive below at the high school I attended. The administration's main problem with it wasn't the falling 50+ pound objects, no, it was that some of the students involved didn't bother to sweep up the shattered glass.

Some friends of mine went the alternate route of putting the stuff into the trunk of their (or another friend's) car instead of the intended dumpster so that they could be used as target practice. The earlier PC clones were pretty effective at stopping rounds from a .22, especially when fired from a pistol, but anything bigger would totally shred everything.

The minicomputers, on the other hand, were a lot more durable. The steel was thicker and there were a lot more layers of it, as one ought to expect after seeing the parade of cars with bottomed out suspensions hauling the stuff away.
posted by wierdo at 5:34 PM on November 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


From Bob Pease Didn't Hate Spice Simulators:

It was in the mid 90s when I started working for Sing and Lee in the Data Acquisition group. I came into work one morning at about 8:15am. Lee was standing in the hall of building D holding his pipe. Lee said he just needed to talk to someone, and proceeded to explain what it was like to be Bob’s manager. That morning Lee had an urgent voice mail from National Semiconductor security. It seems that the previous evening a pile of surplus monitors that were stacked in the hallway of bldg D had gone missing. I told Lee that, indeed, I remembered seeing the monitors when I left to go home the previous evening. Apparently someone “matching Bob’s appearance” had gotten a group of people together and carried the monitors to the top of parking structure by Bldg. E. Then a co-conspirator videotaped Bob throwing monitors off the top of the parking structure while yelling something like “these computers will never lie to anybody every again.”

The Man, The Legend.
posted by flyingfox at 6:10 PM on November 12, 2019 [8 favorites]


That was surprisingly disappointing - it was the opposite of a powerful and compelling display of histrionics. Nice scenery though, so I'll give it a 4 overall.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:45 PM on November 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


I appreciate that they took pains to emphasize that the equipment was unusable by others before destroying it.
posted by wires at 7:07 PM on November 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


I once met a computer so horrible that when I was asked to tune it up and repair it I just gave them one I had laying around with the stipulation they let me execute their old one by defenestration.

First off, it was a Compaq desktop from one of their darkest eras. This was the era where the invented entirely new forms of beige like ultrabeige and hyperbeige.

Second off, it was dumb in so many different ways that it was fractally dumb, like an entire committee of rather talented but disgruntled computer designers all made a secret pact to build the worst reasonably terrible desktop possible entirely out of spite and malice.

One example of such a design decision was that to access the RAM, HDD and motherboard you had to disconnect the power supply and tilt it up, but then it would only tilt so far and you couldn't plug the power cable back in to ground the case, and it only tilted so far out of the way so it didn't really serve much ergonomic function to access the computer hardware.

It was like someone saw the clever designs of older pro Mac desktops that unfold and open without tools like origami and they thought "Hey, let's do that except not! It just does the first clever part then stops right there. And let's have it take up rather too much of the case so we compromise everywhere else. Like the size of expansion cards or even the height of a RAM module because this thing is in the way basically all the time. Hey, I guess that means we can put the CPU chip on this clever proprietary daughterboard, too! That's always a crowd pleaser!"

Third, it bit me rather horribly several times in a variety of painfully interesting ways. The aforementioned daughterboard had a couple of rows of pins that were razorwire sharp and chewed on me more than once. They were sharp enough that it was like brushing up against a bundle of x-actos, you couldn't really feel them chewing on you if you touch them. Many edges and punch-outs of the case were unfinished and were also razor sharp and gave me horrible paper-cut like cuts.

15 minutes inside the case and there's an alarming amount of blood on electronics. 30 minutes and I'm still wrestling with the drive cages and super awkward screw arrangements under or around the dumb tilting power supply. I can't remember how long I worked on that thing, but it was likely hours and hours before I threw in the (bloody) towel and offered to just give my friends-slash-clients one of my spare computers.

The next day I took it up on top of a 3.5 story tall roof and happily tossed it into the brick courtyard and then... didn't really smash itself to bits satisfyingly enough, so I carried it up there and chucked it off a few more times. Then we took turns smashing it with a sledge hammer and a crowbar until it was well and truly spindled and mutilated.


My second story involves working for a campus where one year we had a real batch of lemons sold to us from when Toshiba took an impressively gymnastic swan dive head-first into a septic tank.

A typical incoming grad student class for our program was generally on the order of about 1000-1200 students, and laptops were mandatory, and it was highly recommended that students picked out one of ours for the free support and fleet service as well as on-site repairs and parts and such. The choices ranged from desktop replacement full business class laptops at the low end to bleeding edge ultraportables, because we didn't (usually) mess around with what we contracted and bought. It was a tech-focused program and to be frank we were ultra-nerds and ruthless about it when it came to spending megabucks on a truckload of laptops. We had to use these things too as well as support them, so they better not suck.

Well that year we fucked up. Well, Toshiba fucked up, to be more accurate. I remember seeing the numbers at the end of the financial year and our replacement rate was something totally insane like an average of 2-3x per seat meaning that every laptop in that year's program had been sent back and either factory refurbished or replaced outright two or more times. We had to basically do a second complete rollout somewhere towards the end of the first semester and offer a very liberal free exchange and loaner policy. And so we had a pretty sizeable mountain of zombie laptops, loaners, parts donors and various corpses.

So at the end of that school year after finals we had a BBQ and a keg mixer on the lawn and patio. This part was normal and something we did every year.

What was brand new was the laptop pinata beatdown. This proved to be extremely popular with the students. It was scary popular. Feral. People were hitting those laptops so hard they were exploding into shrapnel and confetti and people were getting peppered and beaned with parts forty feet away. People discovered if you whacked them really hard on the bottom with the lid open you could make most of the keys on the keyboard spray out everywhere.

Yeah, we weren't allowed to do that again.

You know, I should open a hipster bar. Instead of axe throwing you get some PPE, a claw hammer and sixty seconds in a room full of junk and computers. You could have a whole menu of appetizers and upgrades. Upsell that hammer to a pick axe or sledge hammer. Chuck a full computer off the roof into a secured crash zone. Maybe have one of those big industrial shredders and you could chuck fridges and couches into it.

Heck you could make it an official disposal and recycling center at the same time. Got a shitty old couch and don't want to pay the curbside pickup fee? Why not spend that money on beer instead and toss it into a shredder yourself?
posted by loquacious at 7:29 PM on November 12, 2019 [32 favorites]


There is a picture from early 2000, of me teeing off on a 286 with an 8-pound sledgehammer.

It was...cathartic.

We also ran over another PC (law office cast-offs, sans hard drives) with a truck, using a ramp.
posted by notsnot at 7:38 PM on November 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


People were hitting those laptops so hard they were exploding into shrapnel and confetti and people were getting peppered and beaned with parts forty feet away. People discovered if you whacked them really hard on the bottom with the lid open you could make most of the keys on the keyboard spray out everywhere.

Yeah!! Now that's the kind of purgative drama I was hoping for in the FPP link!

Also, Secured Crash Zone is the name of my new band.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:48 PM on November 12, 2019 [7 favorites]


I remember in Sydney back in the 2000s when flatscreen TVs started to become an economical alternative to CRTs, people would put their old glass televisions on the footpath for Council hard rubbish day. Which meant that once every month to three months (depending on the Council's policies for hard rubbish collection) you'd get metal collectors going around with sledgehammers, cracking streets full of these cathode tubes like video game power-up boxes, stripping out the copper, and leaving the footpath covered in slivers of television glass. Bad times
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:09 PM on November 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


You know, I should open a hipster bar. Instead of axe throwing you get some PPE, a claw hammer and sixty seconds in a room full of junk and computers.

Yeah these are called Rage Rooms.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:30 PM on November 12, 2019 [7 favorites]


Also, Secured Crash Zone is the name of my new band.

The hell it is. That was my powertoolcore band in the mid 1990s. We toured with Crash Worship and Survival Research Laboratories.
posted by loquacious at 8:37 PM on November 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


I had an after school job in high school, working for the county school district, where a friend and I (district got us as a matching pair of nerds, via our high school programming teacher) would sort through incoming donated computers for working/worthwhile machines and components. Mostly fairly obsolete stuff being offloaded by local companies because it was cheaper and presumably tax deductible to boot to donate the lot to the school district than to pay to have it trashed.

This was 1996-7, and we were sorting through a lot of junker 286s with some 386 and the occasional 486 coming through. Saw a pentium maybe twice. So mostly it was junk as soon as we saw it, even if it was otherwise functioning. And if it was junk, we threw it away, into a compacting dumpster out on the loading bay right next to our windowless work space.

The novelty of chucking equipment into a hole with intent to damage wore off pretty quick, because nothing much actually happens and we didn't get to run the compactor, and anyway we were a couple of beanpole nerds so it was just a lot of physical work to give something a good toss instead of just schlepping it over to the compactor and dropping it in.

But when we had monitors to chuck there was always the hope for tube implosion or something, or at least we imagined. I don't remember ever managing anything particularly impressive, but the sound of glass shattering and crumpling once in a while was a nice payoff.

Anyway, I mostly like the video in the link for illustrating just how fuckin' quickly normal humans get tired when they try swinging a sledgehammer around for a bit. Sledgehammers are heavy and nobody has good form; to the extent that the video is sort of disappointing versus the fantasy of glorious rage-trashing equipment, it's also very humanizing in its grounding of the limits of that fantasy.
posted by cortex at 9:01 PM on November 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


it's die motherfuckers die motherfuckers still
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:08 PM on November 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


Secured Crash Zone is the name of my new band.

The hell it is. That was my powertoolcore band in the mid 1990s. We toured with Crash Worship and Survival Research Laboratories.


Fair enough. In that case I'll go with Tube Implosion, or maybe Hard Rubbish Day.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:17 PM on November 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


UVa fraternity boy circa 1981. Old large black and white TV that still glowed bright but no longer got an actual TV reception picture. We carried that sucker up to the 3rd floor roof along with many extension cords. Plugged it in and around 2:00am, when it was dark and the usual beverage had been consumed in large quantities, off the roof into Mad Bowl it went still plugged in, still glowing bright. Quite the explosion of light, sparks and parts.

Good times had by all.
posted by AugustWest at 10:10 PM on November 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


Sledgehammers are heavy and nobody has good form; to the extent that the video is sort of disappointing versus the fantasy of glorious rage-trashing equipment, it's also very humanizing in its grounding of the limits of that fantasy.

Yeah, no one told those grad students this because they went Lord of the Flies on those laptops with that baseball bat. Granted, a bat is a lot easier to swing than a sledge, but on that day you could have told me most of them were there on a baseball scholarship and I would have believed you.
posted by loquacious at 10:19 PM on November 12, 2019


Recycling in front of our eyes would be so much more satisfying. Watching the metals melt and smoke, seeing them just coalesce into liquid, utterly void of meaning, returning to origin with no reflection of where they have been.
posted by Thella at 11:43 PM on November 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


I was surprised to learn that Fark still exists. But, then, they probably think the same about us.

MetaFilter: Like Fark, only a little more sophisticated.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:45 PM on November 12, 2019 [8 favorites]


cortex: "Sledgehammers are heavy and nobody has good form"

Yeah, came here to say that the guy in the vid has terrible form... he was trying to muscle it out, but the weight of the sledge should be doing the work for you. Even me, with my white collar callus-free lily white hands, sitting here at my 9-5 in my air conditioned office with the sit-stand desk, can see that I have better sledge form than this guy. No endurance whatsoever, but I can swing a sledge.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:45 AM on November 13, 2019


I was on the Xbox team when they had just finish a big upgrade to one of the Xbox Live services.

To celebrate, they took one of the old servers used for it up on to the roof of the Studio A building, and threw it off the side as a celebration. It was enjoyable being outside and seeing that machine coming down and smashing into bits!

Of course, nobody told Microsoft Campus Security about that, and it wasn't long before one of their vehicles drove up to investigate what happened. :)
posted by evilangela at 11:52 AM on November 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


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