Bon Voyage, Oliver, Adieu!
Manufactured in Taiwan in Feburary of 1995, perhaps on some stuffy and temperamental-weathered day, Oliver the iBook G4 was born. Silicon, solder, mercury, cadium, arsenic, plastic polymers and liquid crystals fused and brought life into the inanimate form. An apogee in technical and architectural mastership, a jewel of computer science and an ace card for Apple Computer, the new notebook for the market was released. Fresh off the assembly line, still piping hot with the aroma of newness and potential and cradled by polystyrene and cardboard, it reached Sydney’s sandy shores sometime in early July and slugged an arduous life ever since its very first boot sequence.
One of the biggest problems we’re facing at the moment is the consumer-culture attitude brought to a gratuitous excess – the belief that old technology products are useless to us, and shouldn’t even be considered for recycling or reuse. And even with the current technologies for recycling available, the big companies and corporations are in it for the money – pulling apart logic boards and solder, to salvage copper and other scrap metal parts for resale. This is an attitude that must be changed if we are truly caring and conscious of our environmental footprint.
Nevertheless, one of the central problems here is that most people are ignorant of the fact that technology products contain a balance of highly recyclable ingredients, highly toxic ingredients and are, in most cases, very easily repairable for re-use. Earlier this year, I managed to donate over fifty old Macs to charities and it is a great sensation to know they will be put to full utilisation. I’m a big believer and practicer of recycling and re-using technology products, and it almost brings tears to my eyes in the joy in seeing this old rig given a new lease of life.
In his admirable off-white shell, Oliver rested many hands, sheltered the internals from the elements of the world. Glue peeled from his joints, metal expanded from his pouts, the close-catch never engaged when you wanted to put the monitor down and head to sleep. Without a complaint and ne’er a system crash, it played DVDs, it did word processing, it surfed the Internet and was so darn hot on your lap, it probably would have fried a couple of eggs for you, while waiting impatiently for it to load the simplest of applications.
Oliver had a special purpose in my heart. Taken from the boy of the same name from the Dickens novel, I rescued him from a decrepit, dusty, dirty home where he was not looked after and seldom used. Ready for disposal, I brought him to life with a jumpstart of technique, patience and expertise, prying together whatever resources I could scavenge and afford. Ruddy-cheeked and devilishly opinionated, we had many quarrels with Microsoft Word — (yes Oliver dear, I realise that my sentence is a ‘fragment’.)
And in October of 2009, he found a new home in the Pyrénées-Orientales, Catalan, Sahorre, a province of Southern France bordering Spain. Soon he will be absorbing the sights and smells of saffron from his farmer-family caretakers and possibly mailing me soppy love-letters that I will need a translator to interpret. Thesis, rent, rantings and more, you had a good run.
Bon Voyage, Oliver, Adieu!
- P.S. I hope you get first-class seats in International AirMail! Cattle-class is just so passè.
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