My dad recently got rid of the shed in his backyard. It was uncharacteristically non-emotional for me. I have nostalgic connections with many things from my childhood, but apparently they do not extend to thirty-year-old wooden storage buildings.
If you ever want to watch human ingenuity at its finest, find something seemingly impossible to move and then advertise it for free on Craigslist. My friend did this once after purchasing a home that “came with” a less-than-new pool table in the basement. After scratching his head for a week, he advertised the pool table for free on Craigslist with that tagline that should make anyone suspicious — “as is, where is.” Two hours later a couple of guys showed up with a saw, a pickup truck, and a plan.
My dad’s shed was 16′ long, 10′ wide, 9′ tall, and had to be removed through a gate that was 8′ wide. It hadn’t been used in years. I got everything I wanted out of the shed in the early 90s when I first moved out, and went back a second time “just to make sure” there wasn’t anything left I wanted. There wasn’t. When all the stuff moved out, spiders, wasps, and God knows what else moved in. One of the shed’s doors had rotted and fallen off. My dad had considered paying someone to break it down and haul it off. Instead, he advertised it “as is, where is” on Craigslist, and within a day or two, some guys showed up with some saws, a pickup truck, and a plan.
It must have taken them several trips to remove the shed. To get it out through the gate (it was originally assembled on site), they had to disassemble a large puzzle that wasn’t meant to come apart. Based on the carnage they left behind, they didn’t need all the pieces. When Susan and I went over to visit my dad last weekend, we found bits of wood with old nails strewn across his yard, along with all the stuff that had remained inside the shed. It was stuff that each of us had put in the shed for one reason or another and never claimed. The people who took the shed didn’t want it either, apparently.
This was my first computer printer, a VIC-1525 that connected to my Commodore 64. There are few things worth less in the retrocomputing hobby than old dot matrix printers. The VIC-1525 wasn’t a great printer when it was new. The tractor feed mechanism was an equal opportunity offender and jammed as much paper going in as it did coming out. Years ago I acquired this same model of printer still in its original box complete with a $249.99 sticker on the side. I couldn’t give it away for free at a computer/gaming convention. If no one would take one in mint condition for free, you can imagine what the one pictured above (wasp nest and all) is worth.
The VIC-1525 was a 7-pin printer that lacked receding letters, and although its idea of “black” was “light gray,” I certainly used the snot out of mine. I printed volumes of game documentation, BBS log files, and hacking information, which I punched holes in using an old, dull three-hole punch and stored in three-ring binders for decades. All of the printouts have since been scanned in and archived. Of course.
(Spoiler: those passwords are from 1986 and no longer work.)
Almost nothing left where the shed had been brought back any memories, but I did find a couple of plastic cups that made me smile.
During the 1990s, Mazzio’s Pizza and Ken’s Pizza (both owned by the same parent company) sold refillable cups. After purchasing the cup for 99 cents, you could refill it for an entire year. The one from Mazzio’s on the left is a “Free Fill” (a play on refill) cup. Whenever I fill my “to go” cup one last time before leaving a restaurant I call that a “free fill.” I must have stolen that term from these cups but forgot. The cup on the right was a Fill-It-Up cup from Ken’s that worked the same way.
The only catch with these cups was that they were “only” good for a single calendar year (a year’s worth of soda for 99 cents seems like a fizzy good deal today). At the end of the year, the old cups were no longer honored and you had to buy a new one. If you ever wondered what happened to all those leftover cups that could no longer be sold, now you know — they went to my house. I literally owned hundreds and hundreds of those cups, so many that I don’t think I washed a single cup for several years. When you own an entire case full of plastic cups, they become disposable.
The cups, the printer, my old aquarium stand, the wood with nails still in it and the rest of the shed’s rotten guts are sitting on my dad’s trailer, waiting to be put in a pile next weekend for his neighborhood’s big trash pickup.