From September 2004 to June 2006, I worked for the Port Angeles School District as their Chief Information Officer.  Small staff and imbedded anal-retentive management with over restrictive state regulations.  We had been moving *worthless* tech equipment to Monroe School which had been surplused.  We had the waste disposal people bring us a large dumpster-you could have put three uncrushed cars in it.  We were filling it with many things.  Someone noticed this and wrote a letter to the School Board or paper complaining about how we were wasting taxpayer money.  We were not but I had to write this letter.

The Tech Department in preparing for a surplus sale moved computer hardware from the Monroe outdoor gym to the old music room.  75 surplus computers are there that do not meet the minimum standards of the district.

At the same time, the Tech Department place a number of burned-out monitors into a dumpster.  When monitors fail, they are replaced from a pool of old monitors.  The old burned-out monitors were being stored at Monroe pending an opportunity to send them to the dump.  A large amount of defective cable, switches and computer carcasses were also trashed.  Excess manuals that were not recyclable were also placed in the dumpster.  Some material was brought from another school, but it was not computer equipment.

There was no value whatsoever to anything placed in the dumpster.  When computers fail, the components that still have value are used to repair other computers.

The reality was that there were hundreds of older ancient computers that in theory could run Windows but would take 20 to 30 minutes just to start up.  They were worse than worthless.  We threw them in the dumpster, locked it up and had them hauled away.

Also, in Monroe school gym was all of the junk various departments had declared surplus, broken chairs, desks, outdated microscopes, thousands of books and truly decades worth of crap.  State law prevented us from throwing it away but we could sell it. 

To reward me for annoying the Superintendent, I was given the task to inventory the items.  I simply looked at the list of items provided by other departments, declared them to be correct and published “my list” and invited the public to come bid.

That anyone would want it was a mystery to me.  I did contact a friend from the college and a fellow Rotarian and asked him to come bid on it, (the law prevented me or anyone else in the district from bidding on it).  He did, he offered $1.00 for all of it.  Another bid $1.25.  He bid $3.00 and won.

It took months to figure out how to ship it all to Africa but he did.  Hopefully it made a difference to a school somewhere.