Long Live the Monitor

The Parking Lot of Dead Monitors

Okay, this is just too funny not to share.

I recently had my computer monitor die on me.  In its defense, it didn't go without warning.  It had been dying for some time, the picture fading in and out at weird times as I tried to work on the computer.  It was old.  At least fifteen years old by my reckoning.  (Which is ANCIENT in computer years.)   It gave me good and faithful service all those years, too.  I thought of trashing it months ago, but I finally decided to wait for it to slip away quietly on its own.

On Memorial Day it faded to black for the very last time.  And stayed that way.  There was no hope of resuscitation.

The Monitor was dead.  Long live the Monitor.

It was a hugely awkward, ponderously heavy old thing, so I had to enlist the help of a neighbor to dispose of it.  I asked if he could please take it downstairs and leave it by the dumpsters.  There are always folks scavenging for stuff there.

Instead, he dropped it into one of the large, deep black trash receptacles.  Okay.  That was the end of that, I thought.

The next morning I came outside to find that someone had fished that heavy, huge monitor out of the bottom of the dumpster and set it out in the middle of the parking lot off the alleyway.

Someone went to great trouble to draw the perfectly concentric circles around it

Bizarrely, they had also drawn chalk circles around it.

WEIRD.

I thought someone was just marking it for a pick-up.  However, when I came home from work that night, the monitor was still there, the circles were still there, and people had carefully parked their vehicles in the parking lot to avoid hitting it.

AGAIN WEIRD.

It was way too heavy for me to lift, so I had to leave it where it was.

It looked so lonely

The next day, I didn't see it.  I thought, "oh good!  Someone has found a home for it!"

Oh, no.  When I returned from work, I finally saw that someone had dragged it back over next to the black trash dumpsters.

Poor thing.

It sat there for nearly a week before someone indelicately bashed it, ripped it apart, and took whatever there was of value inside it - Copper wires?  Gold circuit boards?  I have no idea.

It made me a little sad.

It's gone now. What was left of it finally went to that mystical, faraway land of all trash.  In its place I have a small, sensible flat screen monitor.  The day of these huge bulky things is long past.

I still wonder why someone would place that monitor in the parking lot and draw circles around it.  It looked vaguely like it was part of some strange pagan ritual or something.

I suppose I'll never know.