User:Icicle

My name is Christen. My likes include free coffee, bowling, cocktails, sleeping in, crafts and tacky jewelry. I My professional interests include words and smashing.

My dislikes include licorice.

I can be rrrreached at icicle at freegeek dot org

Interested parties are encouraged to familiarize themselves with this document [[1]].

---

Bless me, councilors, for I have slacked. It's been three months since my last recycling report. The last three months have been more chaotic than usual for me, as I have been dealing with personal health issues and an exceptional surfeit of hardware donations, both of which have left me too buriby106fd.bay106.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/hmhome?fti=yes&curmbox=00000000%2d0000%2d0000%2d0000%2d000000000001&a=781b06dc570b0da5135c448daf37b2c151574a5a4711d6a3df118c776a1825fbed and fatigued to file proper and regular reports. However, things are getting back on track again, and though they are coming along slowly, I'm trying to make the recycling area look and run much better. I've had a ton of help from Guy and Nathan, who built shelving for incoming monitors, and rearranged the wlo-filling bins to create an additional workstation near the black hole. Not only that, the area behind the recycling work bench is no longer a death trap. It's not a perfect system, but it's something.

Recycling has seen several important changes since my last report. Anecdotally, we are simply handling much, much more hardware than we were when I started my job in June. I have learned the hard way that this makes for a much smaller margin of error when it comes to my job. One missed or cancelled pickup (as I experienced today), one huge hardware donation, one forklift breakdown -- all of which have occurred in recycling in the last month -- can take days or even weeks to get un-buried. Heck, we received a donation of a film-to-video translator last week, and that alone blocked much of the recyling work area for several days.

I think this ties in with the recent discussion of how to reduce clutter at Free Geek. I would agree with Matthew's assessment that while it may look like we are being complacent about clutter, it's a fact that we all spend a lot of time cleaning up messes. It's just that new messes replace recently-cleaned ones very quickly. That said, I also like Richard's ideas for helping Free Geek in general become more organized -- particularly, puttign someone in charge of each given work area. Not only does it build in accountability; when one person is responsible for a specific area and want to make it run smoothly, that can force people to make decisions about an object rather than hem and haw about whether and how it might be useful. The recycling area is often used to store large items that aren't there to be recycled (say, the shoe bike, or pallets of grant boxes), or large items that take a long time to recycle. I try to be a good sport about this, but because it does congest the recycling area, I try to get a timeline from the parties who placed them there and work around it. If I can't get a timeline, I throw down a deadline ("three days or it goes in the steel dumpster").

Some other important recycling news:

• We are now selling motherboards, processors, wires, cords, motors, etc. to Calbag Metals, a family-owned metals recycler in Portland. Calbag's specs have led us to make a number of important procedural changes in the recycling area. These are documented on the wiki and our reorganization and change in signage reflects the changes as well. If you haven't been back to the warehouse in a while, or if you haven't checked out the recycling wiki pages in a while, please do so. I'm a bit behind on this, but still working to include current information about recycling income, the prices we get for materials, and to keep the shipping diary up-to-date so we can keep track of both money and recycling tonnage. Mmmm, tonnage. So, a shameless plug: http://wiki.freegeek.org/index.php/Recycling. This includes a totally rockin' ASCII graphic of the new warehouse layout. So, if you've got something in your hand that's marked for recycling but you're not sure where it goes now, let your fingers to the walking.
• Oh yeah! The L-wing. Our forklift, the beloved L-wing fighter, is still not running. Our forklift mechanics, Premier Lift Truck Services out of Tualitin, have sent us a loaner forklift -- the lovely standup model with no side-shift and with the horn button that sticks. It's a workable, temporary solution, but the action committe is still the debating the following options: 1) the coast of fixing the L-wing (at press time we didn't have a quote from the mechanic yet); 2) leasing a new forklift; 3) writing a grant for a new one. There is DEQ money available should we choose option #3, but it won't be available until this falls, says Oso. Some friends of Free Geek are putting a bee in local business' bonnets about a possible donation. Anyone with leads on any of these options is encouraged to e-mail action@lists.freegeek.org.
• This week Oso and I met with an account representative from Waste Connections, Inc., a local company that's interested in selling or leasing us a baler. It would cost $350 to $450 to lease a baler, with a 19 percent interest rate -- expensive. However, baled steel, cardboard, paper and plastic -- all of which are a wash for us now -- is likely to bring in enough income to at least cover our monthly payments. No decisions have been made yet, but we'll keep the community posted.

That's the news from here, but if there are any more questions or concerns about recycling, I'd like to know. If I'm not in the warehouse, I'm in my office, and if I'm not in my office, I'm reachable by e-mail.