You knew this day would come.
Your beautiful wife has been on a cleaning kick. She has been tidying the upstairs bedrooms, which used to be the boys’ rooms, which were an awful mess of teenage boys’ junk. You thought you could tuck your preciousses in there, where they would blend in and she would never notice. No one would notice. They were safe.
But then, one evening, she drops a great big box on the ottoman. She looks at you, accusingly.
“I thought you weren’t hoarding these things anymore,” she says.
“You never know when you might need that special cable,” you say, “You might give me some big home improvement project some day, and that box will hold exactly what will do the job.”
She gives you that look. You know the one. The one where she’d really like to say something critical, but she’s holding it back, because she’s so darned nice all the time.
“Sort it out now,” she says. “I’m hauling everything away tomorrow.”
You go through it all. There was ribbon cable in there. A Centronics parallel interface. A 1200 baud modem. You never know when you might suddenly have a use for a 1200 baud modem, and they’re just about impossible to find nowadays! Oh my god, Firewire cable. You know how much that stuff cost? Appletalk to ethernet adapters. Phone wire. Ancient mice that only worked with the old school Apple mouse connectors. You untangle and sort, and she glares at you and you end up throwing all that history away. You finally cling to only a couple of nice ethernet switches, and you found your handy RS-232 patch adapter, which you slip into your pocket when she wasn’t looking. It’s all going to the dump now.
She doesn’t know about the much bigger stash you keep in the lab, though, so you’ll still be OK if the apocalypse comes and you absolutely must solder up a serial-to-parallel cable, or you’ll die.
Oh, no! She just came down the stairs with the big spool of Cat5! We can’t get rid of that!