Being geeks, its seemed appropriate that our service project for the National Day of Service utilize our geek skills. Thanks to my network, we ended up testing donated monitors at CCNV Homeless Shelter. Cheryl Harrison, Mickey Panayiotakis and I were offered a large room with donated equipment stacked randomly everywhere and a promise to check on us later. The room was full of monitors, printers, cables, and random items I could not identify. One box we came across was full of laptops. Laptops with no power cords. Now who would donate a box of laptops with no power cords? Best of intentions, I'm sure.
Dealing with the whole room would require weeks. We found a couple of working CPUs, created a system for testing the monitors and marking them "Good" or "Bad". A couple of hours later we had tested about 50 monitors.
Masses of donated equipment is an issue for many community tech programs. Folks with good intentions offer up used equipment but the recipient of the donations then has testing and distributing the equipment to deal with which is time consuming. Who ends up doing that work? Very often the result is a room full of equipment, just as we encountered.
