The Onion

I have a 5 gallon “bucket of USB.”

It’s only 3/4 full!

Ive got several drawers of them. I might need those SATA cables someday. And mini USB cables. And cell phone charger and data cable for a Motorolla Razr.

What a tiny little stash. I have boxes and not by the hair of my old serial modem cable will I give any of it up.

My old man has been hoarding cables since he moved to Canada in 1987. He recently got the chance to use an old SCSI cable. He looked like he was 24 again.

Hahaha…asshole. I’m going through it tomorrow, promise.

I packed mine and moved it to a new house today; along with the voice module to the Odyssey game system i got for my 11th birthday.

I'd love to have just one little container of cables.

There's a myriad of reasons to retain a healthy variety of outdated cables, but the most important for me has been ones to make digital archives. You probably have some hardware laying around in your attic somewhere and, someday, you may wish you had archives of your content. If you don't, you probably know someone who does.

Old tech like this is something that would be nice for your local library to keep stock of. I've been to libraries in the past that had a section carved out as a "library of things," where you could rent odds and ends like sewing machines, non-consumable art supplies, and even assorted computer equipment. If your local library doesn't have something like this, maybe you could propose that they start one and perhaps donate some equipment to help them get started!

Heh. Went through just that box of mixed cables this year. Got rid of all the ancient cable duplicates (like 2.5 floppy ribbon cable) and kept one of each, more useful ones I kept duplicates of like SATA cables. The rest were gotten rid of.

Hey, I just bought a cool old piece of tech, and it needs a cable with that old fat USB connection they used to have. I dug in my box of old cable and found several, of different lengths.

I also keep a box of old AC adaptors, and when I get some old electro-box thingy, I can almost always find an adapter for it.

Everybody makes fun of the tech hoarder, until he saves the day. Then they go back to making fun of him again.