Compartment 14

This Sony Bass Reflex Speaker System might still work – I can’t find the chord for it. It sat in the corner of my grandparents’ living room for years, with a CRT television that didn’t make it into this exhibition. Also in the same corner sit a metal pendulum scale and a few other e-waste items. Someone put the e-waste there for disposal but nobody disposes of it.

The other things on this shelf are portable CD players. I don’t know who bought these or if they were ever used. I think my grandfather Henry might have bought them so he could listen to CDs on walks. This one has headphones plugged into it, so it seems like someone used it. It was in a drawer underneath his desk on the second floor. The other one was on top of his desk. Towards the end of Henry’s life, my grandparents would both order lots of junk on Amazon, sometimes for themselves and sometimes for my cousins and me. One time, for Hanukkah, they gave us all these little plastic flashlights that didn’t really work. It seemed like somehow they got scammed into buying them. I don’t think these portable CD players were really part of that – everyone had these back in the early 2000s. I’m just not sure whose these were or why there are two identical ones in Henry’s desk.