A lot of people seem to think that identity theft is a recent phenomena but it’s been going on for a long time. Over twenty years ago, a friend of mine received a department store credit card statement for $2000 of home appliances that she hadn’t bought. It turned out that someone had stolen a couple of utility bills off her doorstep and applied for a store-card in her name. I think what angered her the most was that she’d previously been turned down for credit by the same store! That was over twenty years ago and I’m sure that other people have similar tales going back as far as the concept of ‘credit’.

If you’re the sort of thoughtful individual who worries about identity theft then I suspect you might also be the sort of thoughtful individual who worries about the environment and wants to recycle your papers, plastics, tins, bottles etc. – like me.

But what can I do with my shredded paper?

I can’t tip it into the sack for mixed papers because it’ll all blow away. I can’t put it in a plastic bag because that gets recycled separately. It seems counter-productive to buy paper sacks to put it in. And I don’t want to throw it out with the household garbage.

I’ve found the perfect solution… cereal boxes. When the shredder is half full I get an empty cereal box, fill it with shreddings, tape up the top and put it out with the mixed papers. The perfect solution and super simple!

And, it must be said, having a fabulous time.

I spent last Thursday dismantling the computers that are being scrapped. Open the case, remove the power supply, remove the motherboard, remove the RAM, the battery, the processor and heatsink. Put it all in separate piles, grab the next machine off the rack and repeat.

Does that sound boring? Oh no – it’s great… every machine is different – some of them are 15 year old pre-ATX machines, some maybe as new as 5 years old. Every machine is put together differently, different challenges to getting the parts out. The more modern machines were interesting because of the economy of construction and, for the business oriented models, the mechanisms inside them designed to make it easier to change components. The older ones were equally fascinating… plenty of times I stopped to admire an ancient component and thought “wow – I used to have one of these” (and in many cases still do!).

I’ve been fiddling around inside PCs for almost 15 years now so I could pretty much do this with my eyes closed. I’ve also got several years experience with Ubuntu – Free Geek’s operating system of choice. So, with a bit of training, I’m someone they could easily use anywhere in the process.

Their volunteer co-ordinator said something about “fast tracking” me through the system which sounds great… give me a day or so in each position and then maybe find something challenging for me to do there. But first I need to spend time doing each of the jobs so I know how it all works.

I went back on Saturday and spent half the day at “eval 1″. This position is responsible for the initial assessment of the incoming machines. Open them up, remove memory, hard drives, addon cards, optical drives, vacuum them out and then decide if the machine is up-to-spec for re-use. If it is, it goes to “eval 2″ where it’s tested to see if it actually works. If not it goes to dismantling.

Underneath the eval1 desk there’s a big plastic bin into which you drop all the removed cards – a fair mix of graphics cards, sound cards, network cards etc. This bin had reached overflowing so I offered to ‘deal with it’. Dealing with it involved sorting the cards… graphics cards in one pile, network cards in another, modem cards, sound cards etc. And then they’re very fussy about which cards of each type they can reuse. For example the Ubuntu install is done over the network so if you’re keeping a network card it has to be network bootable. Most motherboards already have sound built-in so if you’re keeping a sound card it better be a good one. And graphics cards… that’s where it gets really complicated. They have a very clever flow-chart to help non-technical people identify what to keep and what to bin but I’d seen all this stuff before so could whizz through the bin pretty quickly. Then back to eval1 to help out. Another great day.

I’m back there again tomorrow… officially a “floater” which might just mean I get to stand-in for someone who doesn’t show or (hopefully) it might mean I get to do a couple of different jobs.

Can you tell I’m enjoying this? *LOL*