Frank Gilliland wrote:
Several years ago I came across this old guy up in Mead (a small town
just North of here). He had amassed a HUGE amount of very cool stuff
in a warehouse; just about everything electronic to the mundane to the
riduculous. Piles of electrolytic caps almost as big as your head,
55-gallon drums loaded with old tubes, shelves stacked to the roof
with radios and test equipment from antique to modern, 50-cubes filled
with circuit boards and assemblies, etc, etc, etc. He even had an old
portable BC station in a van, complete with an AN/FRT-39 and a 40hp
diesel generator. Very cool stuff. Every time I showed up he was open
for business...... but would never sell anything! You see, someone had
given him this stupid book that told how to make money from the scrap
metals in electronics. So every time I walked in the door there was
the old man in his wheelchair, smashing transmitter and big old audio
power tubes for a few micrograms of thorium, crushing and desoldering
RF power transistors and vintage chips for maybe a penny's worth of
gold, and all the while bumming smokes from me. Eventually I started
to feel sorry for the fart so I explained that most of the stuff was
worth a hell of a lot more if left intact. I even offered to put some
of the stuff on ebay to prove it to him, but he couldn't shake the
thought that it might have gold in it. Going with that, and having
worked at Johnson-Matthey, I explained that the gold-plated chip lids
didn't have nearly as much gold as the solder that held them on. But
he wouldn't hear of such a thing because the lids were gold and the
solder was white. You couldn't talk sense to the guy because he firmly
believed that he was going to get rich from the info in that idiotic
book. After a few more visits I finally gave up. A couple years later
the building and its contents were condemned in order to make way for
the new freeway. A month later I picked up the van at a county auction
for $200. Just a short time after that he died, alone and broke, in a
nursing home. What a waste. And all because he allowed himself to be
locked him into a mindset of greed that shut out the advice of anyone
else, refusing to see all the wealth he really had, focusing only on
the glitter.

Maybe you're smart enough to learn something from that, Brian. Or
maybe you're not. Only time will tell.

Although this story is touching... I don't see why your telling it to
me. You seem to fault this man for not listening to you.
You are really full of yourself (and other things).
Is it so surprising that I'm not the only one that doesn't listen to
you... LOL

www.telstar-electronics.com