IT Tip Of The Week: Don't Pack-rat

I've been at my current position for less than a year, every so often I still open a drawer in my office and go WTF?

Today was one of those days. Opened the drawer that the old IT consultant (I'm the first full time IT person that TZ has had - previous consultant worked here 3 days a week) had used to store floppy drives and other accessories for laptops. I noticed that there were some unnecessary papers in the drawer (don't need to keep those AC Adapter manuals) and started to look at what else was in the drawer.

Lo and behold I found a ziplock bag full of twist ties. Twist Ties! You know, those things that come around the cords for every mouse, keyboard, etc. on new systems and parts.

Some of you might think that hoarding twist ties is a good idea, but it certainly breaks my 6-12 month rule.

"If you do an honest assessment and cannot see yourself using an item in the next 6-12 months, dump it!"

-- Alex Scoble's IT People Shouldn't Pack-rat Stuff They Won't Use Within 6-12 Months Rule

I can't even begin to tell you how much paperwork, odd connectors, old cables and other worthless junk I've had to trash since I've gotten here.

So don't be bad. Don't be a pack-rat, cuz pack-rats are bad.

Don't scrimp on the small stuff to preserve your neurosies. If you need to clean up cables on a regular basis, go to Fry's or Graybar and buy a big bag of zip-ties and some velcro straps.

Don't save floppy disks for drivers that you can download from the net and store on your IT file server.

Don't store paperwork that won't make any sense to the next person because you hand wrote a bunch of words haphazardly on a blank sheet of paper.

Don't keep odd cables that haven't been used since the days of the PDP 11/84.

If you are going to hoard, at least keep good stuff that you can use and that doesn't make you look like a complete amateur. It will make you look much better when your slot is filled with another IT person after you leave and will help that next person out a lot as well.

Coming into a new workplace is hard enough without wading through someone else's junk to find the parts, nuggets of information or software that you need.

Comments

[Andy]

as long as your pc has a working nic then the advice about drivers is a good one - not so good if you don't have a working nic - although I guess you can burn a cd (which is wasteful for a couple of MB's) or use a usb disk (as long as you are not running 98 (see above))

[Alex Scoble]

In my case I keep a bunch of used floppies around, quick format and put drivers on them as needed.

Use them for Ghost boot disks as well.

As far as wasting MB of CDs at $.30 a cd, I'm not very worried about not using the space on each one. With modern CDROM drives you can also make the CD-R media multisession and add data later as needed.

[Sikko2go]

I agree completely. At my company there's so much cables, connectors, dozens of old (non-scroll) mice, keyboard, power chords etc. There's no way we're ever gonna need them. Every new piece of equipment comes with it's own utilities, and as the utilities' lifetime in general is longer than that of the machines itself, it's better to throw the power chord away with the broken monitor itself. Or clean up every now and then. Only thing is: recently I did please a friend with a simple 100MB Ethernet, which are also lying around by the dozen, so getting rid of all old stuff is also a bit too extreme, still I agree with you completely: pack-ratting old stuff is a bad idea

[confirmed hoarder]

As long as you don't just throw the stuff away - think about the environmental impact of every single cable tie, paper manual, floppy disk, CD-ROM, etc. ending up in a landfill and being replaced by another cable tie, manual, disk, CD, ...

Hoarding is not necessarily bad, as you can always find a use for old bits of kit or recycle/reuse by giving anything usable to charity or friends.

[jan]

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[allison]

hi,

can someone please tell me where i can buy these plastic coated wire twist ties that come around cables? i really need them for part of a product packaging, and i have been driving myself absolutely nuts trying to find them!

[Alex Scoble]

You can try a hardware and garden store like Home Depot or OSH. They sell spools of it in green for use in gardening.

Or I just found this on google:

http://www.veripack.com//Product/dept.asp?ClickedSku=no&dept_id=11160&DeptPath_id=110%2C+1190%2C+11160&Searched=True&HeaderName=Vinyl+Twist+Ties&search1name=Color&Color=Black