On Getting Wasted
harpers.org
harpers.org
What bothered me on a much more existential level was the insanity. The madness in the minds of the hoarder (whom I had to interact with) that could not be reasoned with. Madness is terrifying because you're just helpless to do anything for them once it sets in. It's like dealing with a mule who refuses to get out of a danger it can't comprehend - because you're robbed of the essential human ability of explanation. You no longer have that human connection to them; you just have to helplessly hope they'll find their own way out.
It is my experience that "madness" adds a layer of abstraction that is almost unique to the single person, and when that person expresses anything through that lens it is nearly completely incompatible with my brain. How would convoluting my reasoning through an additional abstraction help my communication with a "mad" person?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw
At the very least I think it would have been nice if the hoarder in this story was taken away to alternate accommodations for the duration of the clean up. Terrible that she had to witness the event.
"While initially the three patients quarreled over who was holier and reached the point of physical altercation, they eventually each explained away the other two as being patients with a mental disability in a hospital, or dead and being operated by machines."
[EDITED to add: See also http://squid314.livejournal.com/324957.html which is only marginally relevant but anyone who finds "The Three Christs of Ypsilanti" interesting will probably love it.]
The sufferer's world-view, insane as it may be, still has some form of internal logic and structure, large parts of it will be very twisted, but as the sane mind of the two, you have the ability to step into theirs for a tiny bit, see it from their perspective (they themselves are either incapable or tired and worn out from constantly having to adapt to a world-view that doesn't make sense to them). Your advantage is that you only have to bring up the energy to make translate a crazy world-view for a few hours, their plight is 24/7.
(also, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is about linguistics, I don't think you can naturally extrapolate what has been proven about it to the field of mental health)
The article was well-crafted and I particularly enjoyed the WWII soldier's advice:
Don't swing first unless he has twenty pounds on you.
"I’ve had my life threatened by a man with senile dementia. He sat in his armchair, cane at his side, bronchial tube jutting from his neck, and said he’d taken down bigger fellas before. I had at least twenty pounds on him."
This article reminds me of some of the hoarder houses I came across during that time. Sometimes it was my job to help clean up junk, but usually when I came across a hoarder it was because they found something in our store that they just couldn't live without and wanted it delivered for them. It was always a bit unsettling to come to a hoarders house with more junk for them to pile up and realize that I was contributing to an already out of control mess.
I've seen houses that were so packed with crap that the owner literally had to carve out walkways so that they could move from room to room. The rest of the space was stacked with boxes, books, furniture, etc. and was inaccessible.
I met a few fanatic collectors as well that I would consider hoarders. One guy had so many toy trains and so little livable space, that he was moving boxes off his bed every night so that he could get to sleep, and then stacking them up again in the morning so that he could get around. He was very proud of his train collection.
The strangest to me was an older woman who had worked out a deal with my manager to get all the boxes of Christmas knicknacks we had leftover from the holiday season. There was a good 20-30 boxes. She lived alone in a big old Victorian fully decorated with Christmas things. Her living space wasn't really out of control, just over the top tacky. She then showed me the barn where she wanted me to unload the truck, which was packed with more Christmas memorabilia than I've ever seen in one place. I asked her why she thought she needed any more stuff and she said that she just really loved Christmas. She too was very excited about her collection and felt proud to have gathered so much. It was kind of sad...
Now, the coolest collection I got to see was from an aging computer repair guy. This guy wasn't really a hoarder though, just an enthusiast. He had a room in his house where he was storing old machines and called me in to help him get rid of them. There were a good 2-3 hundred computers in his collection. He had been collecting them since the 70's and for years wanted to open up a computer museum. Old Commador PETs, Radio shack TSR-80s, all kinds of neat stuff and most of it was still working. When he contacted me, his health was failing and he just wanted to clear it out. I tried to save as much of the older machines as I could for resale, but most of it ended up being recycled.
Honestly coming to grips with it is terrifying and I wish I had every file I have ever come across to this day, but I don't and there are too many more to get to be worried about the ones I had.
I know I have the potential to become a hoarder. I'm very glad that modern society shows us that people can become ill in that way, because now I'm very vigilant to make sure I don't become that person.
What's with the downvote? It was merely a question to spark discussion about the topic at hand. I am really interested in people's opinion on this. Is that really offensive or counterproductive or not on topic to ask a question and solicit opinions? If you think the answer to the question is "no" then just say so. If you find this comment unproductive, please explain why.
I think this is hard to answer because of the staggering increase in per-capita income over the past 4 centuries or so: at most points in history, only the most wealthy people would even hope to physically accumulate anything close to what a hoarder might.
There weren't hoarders back then because no-one could afford to be a hoarder. Newspapers? Dear by the sheet of paper. Knick-knacks? You don't have any money left over after food and rent. Clothes? You could only afford 1 or 2 outfits, and if you somehow had more, you'd be forced to sell all your excess to the local mercer or ragpicker the next time you got into financial trouble. You can see this in the occasional inventory or will: even nobles had shockingly small numbers of goods. (I think sometimes of Shakespeare willing his second-best bed to his wife; who would even mention any bed, much less the second-best one, in their will these days?)
Furthermore, if you suspect that a downvote is a silent "no", accept it as a no.
The horders I dealt with during my tour of duty had already passed to the next world, but you still had to protect yourself mentally each morning lest you go crazy/question existence/get depressed/etc (happened to a couple of people I worked with, although I don't rule out the possibility that crazy is attracted to this kind of work). For each item in every bedside table, every piece of furniture, every picture, every computer, you had to put aside the memories the deceased person may have had, the reason the deceased held onto the item until the end, the data contained within and make a split-second decision: box or barrel.
Barrels were massive rusted oil drums that we used for collecting garbage. Boxes were used to transport the salable "smalls" for auction. If you were caught considering the saleability of an item for too long you'd soon hear your boss's voice from across the room, "barrel it!"
One time I came across a pair of filing cabinets filled to the brim with research and lecture notes on Egypt and the hieroglyphics. I had already pieced together parts of this person's life to form an image of them - old-money spinster who traveled the world lecturing and having adventures, including sneaking in to China from Hong Kong in 1976 - and their life work was contained in these filing cabinets.
"We can probably get fifty bucks a piece for the filing cabinets; barrel the rest"
For a team of three, two hours per room was budgeted, so everything that was dear to a person over the course of their 70-year life would usually be processed within two days.
Regarding hoarders, the main differences between a dead hoarder and a living one are 1) the fact that you don't have to deal with the emotion as per the OP, and 2) there is no superficial "cleanup" the day before the cleaners arrive. The house is exactly as the hoarder left it as no-one thinks the day before they die, "If I were to die tomorrow I'd be aghast if they found this!"
I know this sounds ridiculous but I would expect a living hoarder would at least manage to dispose of the bucket of feces and used tampons next to the couch if they knew some cleaners were coming. Even hoarders have pride, y'know.
The house with the bucket of tampons was the stuff of legend. Even today, 15 years later, if I were to contact my former boss for a beer it wouldn't be long before the story of that place came up. Along with the tampon-and-poo bucket, the final defacation of the former resident in the sweat-crusted outline on the green velvet couch where the they had spent their final moments is still a vivid memory. The stench, using shovels to scrape up the person's life from where it was stuck to the carpet and fill barrel after barrel, my boss's sense of humour ("whaddaya suppose she used this for?!"), how quiet everyone was on the ride back to the office, showering for an hour afterwards.
Understandably, after working this job for a while I went through an extremely minimalist phase. Even now I pause before most non-consumable purchases. I keep nothing that I wouldn't want someone finding when I die.
I think while many hoarders fear the memories of the past being forgotten, HNers tend to fear being forgotten themselves.
Of course as per the OP, there were good parts to this job too! The pay, for starters, was decent. And discovering some bondage equipment or some naked polaroids of the former resident and their girlfriend was always good for a chuckle and a reminder to stop taking yourself so seriously and enjoy life a bit more.
Another option would be to auction entire hard disks on Ebay with a description as per the above, not sure if this already exists. Then it's a kind of lottery, with massive potential payload for people willing to go through the data.
If that technology existed and was good enough, it would be an interim solution. Grab the data, pulp the paper.
Really, given how cheap and easy it is to store large amounts of information digitally I'm surprised that something like this isn't common for a lot of cases to reduce storage costs.
How many businesses have rooms full of accounting records and receipts going back decades that could instead be taking up a bit of space in a rack? Toss a copy in Amazon Glacier for a penny a gigabyte so you have something off-site and call it a day.
The actual process is, by and large, taking everything to the dump. There do exist some hoarders who keep clean homes and for whom an estate sale could make sense, but many/most have homes that are pretty much garbage pits.
Source: a close relative of mine was a hoarder, and I've watched way too many hoarding shows.
His nephew, who ended up taking care of the cleaning and refinishing, told me he contracted Toxoplasmosis from the accumulated animal feces. I accidentally let that fact slip to the first cleaning crew that was working in the house (without masks) and I didn't see them return after that.
There was an interesting truth in there. The longer you wait to get rid of something, the more it will cost you. I'm sure it would make for an excellent priceonomics story to look at things which cost $X, depreciate down to 0, and then start costing money to dispose. Some don't quite hit zero, but a lot of the stuff in her uncle's house had gone past it into the region of pay someone to haul it away territory.
I'm a part of the hobby machinist community and this comes up quite a lot because many retirees have (literally) tons of heavy machinery in basements and garages. When your 5,000lb manual lathe that cost $50,000 brand new is now only worth its weight in scrap iron (about $500?) but it will cost $2,000 to call a rigger to take it away, that's a problem for whomever you leave behind when you die.
It's bad enough when it's just one or two items, but I've seen hoarder symptoms in many hobby machinists/machine collectors and I feel quite sorry for the wives and children of some of these guys that will be left to deal with the aftermath.
If this is the case, how can it have depreciated down to $0? I feel like I missed a key concept somewhere. With all the functionality of a new lathe, it must be worth something over the value of its materials as scrap... right?
Thus, there are an abundance of used manual machine tools on the market, now they are irrelevant to the manufacturing industry. They remain difficult and expensive to move. They are very heavy take up lots of space, and may have special electrical power requirements. Their capability is also a function of tooling, which may, or may not be readily and cheaply available when obtaining the machine. So, despite the bargain that used manual machine tools represent, they are not likely impulse purchases.
If I had the space, I would love a Monarch 612. You can get them for scrap prices, but its just far too impractical to consider.
A manual tool that can still hold the same tolerances it did when it was new, in the hands of a skilled machinist, is worthless. Because a Haas machining center[1] can hold the same tolerances with an operator who has a 2 year certification degree.
So machine shops don't want (or need) the old manual tools, and yet they still work fine. Great way to build small arms on the cheap :-) If I ever retire to a ranch with space for a machine shop I'll collect these sorts of tools.
I know all about the condition of the bearings in the headstock of my lathe... you most certainly don't and if you're wise you'll hedge your bets.
Also the market is fragmented. I like screwing around in my shop and do not care about revenue per hour generated. A job shop only cares about revenue per hour generated. I don't think the markets are going to make sense to each other, but people insist that selling machine tools is selling machine tools and it doesn't matter if the buyer is a for profit shop or an amateur steam engine tinkerer, unfortunately it does matter, a lot.
And edited to add, skilled people can see hidden value. Sure the ways are worn out on that worthless lathe and that worthless lathe had a trashed QC gearbox but hoarder dude knows how to combine the parts from both and sell the one good one for $2000. True, individually each is worth $0, but combined, with a skilled repair man willing to put in maybe 100 hours of hard labor... And tragically I've seen some semi-hoarding situations where the guy just gets too old... he could make that $2K which would be really helpful for a retired guy's budget, but doc just said no lifting anything and no standing for long periods, so other than praying for an apprentice, it'll sit there till the estate sale.
Those things play off against the costs of "buying" the machine for a non-nominal sum - and also the likelihood of a quick sale.
Note that this was before there was Craigslist in the area.
Based on the article, no, they don't throw away what they can sell or salvage. He talks about this. Whatever isn't valuable, I'm sure they throw away.