This is from before that meant “a way to save perfectly good food from ending up in the landfill because it wasn’t cosmetically perfect. “. AKA “freeganism”.

Don’t even get me STARTED on that.

No, I am talking about the original meaning. The Silicon Valley meaning. Back when I lived in that good old Silly Con Valley in the 90’s, “dumpster diving” meant going looking for perfectly good tech that some big corp was throwing out because they got a newer. slicker model or possibly just had no idea what was valuable tech because they were run by non nerds, known locally as “idiots”.

Oh no, it’s an ID10T error!

I bring up this hoary old subject because I did some recently.

See, something happened after therapy on Thursday. Namely, we discovered that the battery on Joe’s car was dead.

Uh oh spaghetti-os indeed.

Joe felt very bad about it. He attributed it to having left the keys in the ignition while he and Julian were waiting for me.

I don’t know enough about cars to know how probable that is. It could be true or it could be a case of the logical error post hoc ergo proctor hoc, AKA “this is what happened right before event A, therefore it caused event A”.

It is one of the more popular logic errors because when something sudden and impactful (usually something bad) happens the strength of our emotional response to the event really galvanizes the pattern seeking part of our mind, which then immediately links the two most recent events.

This is great if the impactful event is the sudden appearance of a sabre toothed tiger right after you step in some cabre toothed tiger poop, but in our complicated world full of complex stimuli, the associations formed can be downright nonsensical and create lasting problems for people.

An example from my own life : I am absolutely destroyed by the sound of a playground full of children playing. It’s more than a phobia and more than an anxiety attack. It’s like I am traveling backwards in time to when I was in elementary school and an awful lot of very bad things happened to me with that particular sound going on around me.

I know, intellectually, that whatever children I am hearing don’t even know I exist and are no threat to me anyhow as I am now ENORMOUS, but that kind of lmowledge does not make a trigger not a trigger any more.

And that is definitely one of mine.

Anyhow. Where was I? Oh right, dumpster diving.

So while we were waiting for the tow truck guy to come give us a jump start, I got out of the car to get some fresh air and enjoy a very lovely summer day.

And that’s when I noticed that there was this white peg-and-fabric box next to the dumpsters. So I wandered over to check it out.

Turned out, this was the local office build’s “e-waste” depository, where all the tech stuff that has to be recycled in a complex way goes.

And that’s when I realized I lived in a golden age of dumpster diving because it could be done without going near a smelly gross dumpster.

And in amongst the column style fans and printer/fax/copier combos I saw a laptop. So I grabbed that sucker.

And I was all ready to take it home. look it up, order a charger, and see if it worked, but then I realized the battery was missing, and laptop batteries are expensive and sometimes quite tricky to find, so I decided it wasn’t worth it and put it back.

It was then that I noticed that there was a smaller and far less impressive looking smooth white laptop in there as well, and it seemed to have its battery, so I figured, sure, it looks like a toy to me, but WTF.

Took it home. opened it up, and found out it was a MacBook.

Wow, my first Apple product! And I got it the best way possible : for free!

So I then looked all over the thing for a model number, or a series name, or any of the other things a lifelong PC user like me would used to identify a piece of tech.

But of course, this is the mysterious Land of Apple Products, where they assume that the inclusion of anything that… ugh… technical would fry their userbase’s brains right out their skulls, or at the very least send them shrieking into the night and seeking refuge in the nearest fabric and and fiber museum.

Let the soothing textures erase the evil memory of quantitative thinking.

So that threw me for a bit of a loop. Does not compute. so to speak. So I have been spending some time processing the whole deal.

And I have concluded that the only logical answer is that all MacBooks must use the same kind of charger. So sooner or later, I will look that up, and use the results of that to guide me to getting a charger for the dang thing.

And I know it’s a gamble. Might turn out the thing’s a total brick (another term from back then which means “totally nonfunctional tech”) and wouldn’t turn on if I hooked it up to a lightning rod and waited for a strike like in Frankenstein.

(I wonder if that’s a real last name? Because man would that suck. )

But what the hell, chargers are pretty cheap these days, and I might just get myself a (presumably ancient) MacBook out of the deal.

I figure that is worth the gamble. Even if it turns out it really IS a brick, I will have had the fun of acquiring it and anticipating the result.

The damn thing still looks like a toy to me – Baby’s First Laptop, or something.

But it’s toy that I could have a lot of fun with if I get it working.

And isn’t that what toys are for?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.