21 Mar
2005
21 Mar
'05
8:30 a.m.
On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:03:56 +0000, Jules Richardson
<julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 09:50 -0600, William Layer
wrote:
> 'helpful' either. Unless they have a good
'picker' doing the pricing, Goodwill
> and their ilk have a mission to sell old junk for the cheap. We've all had
> impossibly lucky finds at these places..
any more - they've all been forbidden from selling
electrical goods by
the health & safety morons (as in "Oh my God, it plugs into the wall -
that's *dangerous* and someone might sue us").
Goodwill has a mission to sell refurbished and gently used goods at
whatever price the market will bear, in order to finance jobs and
rehabilitation for economically, physically, mentally, or otherwise
disadvantaged individuals.
As part of that process, it is their duty to try and eliminate all
risks inherent in the resale of donated goods (in this case, classic
or neo-classic computers). In that, it is becoming increasingly
difficult to reliably destroy all possibly sensitive data and to
eliminate all potentially hazardous parts; therefore many Goodwills
are simply refusing computer donations at this point.
It should also be noted that many individuals regard Goodwill as a
dumping ground for broken trash. While it is true that one man's
trash can sometimes be another man's treasure, for the most part every
man's trash is just that. For all these reasons and more, Goodwills
across the world are having an increasingly hard time dealing with
outmoded technology, and some must needs simply wash their hands of
the whole mess.
David H. Barr
Sys / Net Admin.
Oklahoma Goodwill Industries, Inc.
PS: Not offended or preaching; just advocating an alternate viewpoint.