The issue was mostly the CRT's - they're like 20 or 25 kg each, I would've had to lug all of them down 3 flights of stairs, plus I would've had to hire a van to bring them away or drive 5 times or so with my car. Plus there are hardly any metals in the monitors, so I wouldn't have gotten paid for them anyway. We were moving offices at the time, I had other things on my mind. I made a deal where everything including the CRT's and a bunch of really old stuff like old ink-jet printers etc. were taken away. Maybe I would've gotten paid a bit had I sold just the PC's - even then it would've been so little that it wouldn't have been worth my time, plus I would've had to pay more for the rest.
Regardless of whether it's possible to get some pocket change for old pc's, the point is: it's not cost effective, when you count the hourly salary of a professional, to do anything more than the absolute minimum to dispose of old computers. Especially for a government organization - bureaucracies are not designed for cost-effectiveness, but for predictability and accountability. That is not a value judgement, just an observation, but one that immediately dispels of 50% of whining about 'governments wasting money'.
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The issue was mostly the CRT's - they're like 20 or 25 kg each, I would've had to lug all of them down 3 flights of stairs, plus I would've had to hire a van to bring them away or drive 5 times or so with my car. Plus there are hardly any metals in the monitors, so I wouldn't have gotten paid for them anyway. We were moving offices at the time, I had other things on my mind. I made a deal where everything including the CRT's and a bunch of really old stuff like old ink-jet printers etc. were taken away. Maybe I would've gotten paid a bit had I sold just the PC's - even then it would've been so little that it wouldn't have been worth my time, plus I would've had to pay more for the rest.
Regardless of whether it's possible to get some pocket change for old pc's, the point is: it's not cost effective, when you count the hourly salary of a professional, to do anything more than the absolute minimum to dispose of old computers. Especially for a government organization - bureaucracies are not designed for cost-effectiveness, but for predictability and accountability. That is not a value judgement, just an observation, but one that immediately dispels of 50% of whining about 'governments wasting money'.