Compartment 15

This miscellaenous pile of plastic waste includes a Polaroid camera, a digital Canon point and shoot, an attachment of some kind that looks like it could be for a Polaroid, an adaptor for the IBM ThinkPad computer, and two car side mirrors.

Some of these devices were in my grandfather Henry’s desk on the second floor. The car side mirrors were in his workshop/junk room in the basement. These items felt especially hoarder-esque to me, but also I can totally understand why Henry kept them. I say Henry kept them because all of the items were in his spaces – his desk and his basement workshop. People tend to hoard stuff like this because it’s hard to dispose of and it feels like it has value. The cameras might even still work with some repair. The car mirrors could potentially be used as well. It feels wrong to throw things like this out, so instead Henry, like many people would, stuffed them into drawers and shelves where they continued to sit for years. Even if they were thrown out, how would we dispose of them properly? They’d probably end up sitting somewhere else for years, hundreds or thousands of years or even longer, before decomposing.