It sits in your home office or game room… 50-plus lurking pounds of heavy metal, (Dude! Rawk Aht! What? Oh, sorry… go on…) plastic and other stuff that really shouldn’t go to a landfill, right below a gargantuan monitor that is so old it occasionally picks up transmissions from the 1939 World’s Fair, and a keyboard that when typed on makes a sound like gunfire clacking up in the hollow and you just know that the Hatfields and The McCoys are a-gonna tussle agin’.
Look, it’s not doing you or anybody else any good right now – you’ve long-since upgraded to the Quad-Processor 1.21 jigawatt monstrosity that will let you buy tasteful clothing with incredible ease, allow you to IM with your no-good layabout friends (OMG! STFU!), and even, perhaps, get some friggin’ work done every once in a while. Your new monitor is one of those fancy-pants LCD types which you could hang on a wall and lift with one hand. So the silicon behemoth collects dust, like some long-forgotten relic of a bygone age.
What to do, what to do… You can’t bury it in the back yard, because you know you’ll lie awake at night slowly going mad, the ticking of it’s internal processor clock like some modern-day tell-tale heart reminding you that burying all those chemicals in the ground just ain’t right. You tried to pawn it off on the neighborhood kids and they just chuckled at you, speeding away on their skateboards, listening to “Panic! At The Disco” on their iPod Nanos. Hell, even your mom turned her nose up at it, and she still can’t quite grasp the whole “cut-and-paste foolishness”, bless her heart…
So donate it to Goodwill Industries of Pittsburgh. This Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Heinz Field, in Alco Parking Lot #2, you can donate all of your old computer equipment. This is a new program, a partnership between Goodwill and Dell Computers, and they’re doing a Good Thingâ„¢. They’ll even clean your hard drive to Department of Defense standards for free, saving you $20 that day only! Hell, you don’t even need to get out of your car.
They’re going to refurbish any computers that are in decent shape and resell them to raise money for local Goodwill programs. Any computers that can’t be refurbished, or are simply too old will be salvaged for any valuable parts and then disposed of properly, diverting up to 2.1 million pounds of waste from area landfills. The whole program will help up to 100 of your fellow Pittsburghers transition from welfare to work.
So, those are good reasons to do it right there. But wait, there’s more… (Isn’t there always?)
Steelers Quarterback and all-around good human Charlie Batch (See: All the good work he’s done for kids in his hometown of Homestead and throughout the area) is slated to be there helping out from 10-11 a.m. You can register for prizes including a flat-panel tv and gift cards, get a tax write-off for next year, free up some space in your house, and most importantly, drive away knowing that just by dropping off your old, unwanted computer, you helped aht in Pittsburgh. Think Globally, Act Locally… n’at.
This event is sponsored by Goodwill, Dell Computers, City of Pittsburgh’s Pittsburgh Partnership and Allegheny County.