A Blip

When I was about eight years old, I started to hold onto almost every little broken electronic thing in my house. I saved everything from bug zappers to remote control cars. As long as it was broken and used electricity, I saved it. I kept them in a plastic bin that is about the size of a child size suitcase that, even now, is still full. That may not sound like much in the scheme of collections, but this one was only on the small side because most of the things that I kept were pretty small themselves. Unlike many other collections of things considered to be “junky,” I didn’t keep these things for the sole purpose of growing my collection. It’s not that I wanted to fix them either, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have been able to, considering just how broken most of the things were. I kept them for my curiosity; I would take the things I saved apart in order to feed my lifelong interest in the way things work. Honestly though, the real reason I kept them was that at that age I thought I was going to magically turn all of it into robots that would do my chores for me, or possibly into a lightsaber. Even though my dedication to all of this has petered out over the past couple of years, I still have the bin of stuff just in case because you never know.