
On Getting Wasted - dnetesn
http://harpers.org/blog/2014/10/on-getting-wasted/
======
Jetrel
I had to clean up a hoarder house on multiple occasions (somewhat like the
author I got a brief, one-time job cleaning a few out); I've got a pretty high
tolerance for the filth in one, so the black mold and decaying clothes didn't
bother me much.

What bothered me on a much more existential level was the insanity. The
madness in the minds of the hoarder (whom I had to interact with) that could
not be reasoned with. Madness is terrifying because you're just helpless to do
anything for them once it sets in. It's like dealing with a mule who refuses
to get out of a danger it can't comprehend - because you're robbed of the
essential human ability of explanation. You no longer have that _human_
connection to them; you just have to helplessly hope they'll find their own
way out.

~~~
justanotherta
That's when in the interest of communication and the task at hand you become
mad yourself. Indulge in insanity then you will have a common ground from
which to reason or appeal to their emotions. If you stand resolute as an
ambassador of polite diligent civility you become just another enemy of their
way of life.

~~~
RevRal
A little vague. Do you have any sources to further explain this communication
technique?

It is my experience that "madness" adds a layer of abstraction that is almost
unique to the single person, and when that person expresses anything through
that lens it is nearly completely incompatible with my brain. How would
convoluting my reasoning through an additional abstraction help my
communication with a "mad" person?

~~~
justanotherta
Yes, there are certainly many different types of "madness". The "layer of
abstraction" that the specific variety of madness imparts on the holder is
their own reality. The hypothetical accepted objective true reality is
irrelevant to them. While this true reality is the standard with which to
measure the conduct of people's behavior, if you are to preserve the emotional
well being of the suffer of madness it would be helpful to communicate and act
in a way which is consistent with their own subjective reality. By delving
into their madness you can understand their behavior and actions more than
understanding it from an outside perspective. If the goal is to simply enforce
external standards this empathy is a waste of resources. But if preserving
their emotional well being is a concern empathy can be a useful tool to both
understand their perspective and guide you in your interactions with the
sufferer.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw)

At the very least I think it would have been nice if the hoarder in this story
was taken away to alternate accommodations for the duration of the clean up.
Terrible that she had to witness the event.

------
enahs-sf
Probably going to get downvoted for this, but I was pleasantly surprised by
the deceiving title. I thought this article was going to be about the endemic
alcoholism in the startup community and it's positive/negative effects on
software development.

The article was well-crafted and I particularly enjoyed the WWII soldier's
advice:

Don't swing first unless he has twenty pounds on you.

~~~
ferrari8608
After reading that, I cracked up reading the second to last paragraph. It's
sad, but I found the way it was stated amusing.

"I’ve had my life threatened by a man with senile dementia. He sat in his
armchair, cane at his side, bronchial tube jutting from his neck, and said
he’d taken down bigger fellas before. I had at least twenty pounds on him."

------
datamatt
Beautifully written article. Is everything in Harper's generally this good?
Considering subscribing if so.

~~~
dnetesn
Yes...Harper's is a fantastic magazines. I've been a subscriber for years.

------
csorrell
For three years I worked for a second hand store, using the companies box
truck to both deliver purchases, and pick up donated materials from peoples
homes.

This article reminds me of some of the hoarder houses I came across during
that time. Sometimes it was my job to help clean up junk, but usually when I
came across a hoarder it was because they found something in our store that
they just couldn't live without and wanted it delivered for them. It was
always a bit unsettling to come to a hoarders house with more junk for them to
pile up and realize that I was contributing to an already out of control mess.

I've seen houses that were so packed with crap that the owner literally had to
carve out walkways so that they could move from room to room. The rest of the
space was stacked with boxes, books, furniture, etc. and was inaccessible.

I met a few fanatic collectors as well that I would consider hoarders. One guy
had so many toy trains and so little livable space, that he was moving boxes
off his bed every night so that he could get to sleep, and then stacking them
up again in the morning so that he could get around. He was very proud of his
train collection.

The strangest to me was an older woman who had worked out a deal with my
manager to get all the boxes of Christmas knicknacks we had leftover from the
holiday season. There was a good 20-30 boxes. She lived alone in a big old
Victorian fully decorated with Christmas things. Her living space wasn't
really out of control, just over the top tacky. She then showed me the barn
where she wanted me to unload the truck, which was packed with more Christmas
memorabilia than I've ever seen in one place. I asked her why she thought she
needed any more stuff and she said that she just really loved Christmas. She
too was very excited about her collection and felt proud to have gathered so
much. It was kind of sad...

Now, the coolest collection I got to see was from an aging computer repair
guy. This guy wasn't really a hoarder though, just an enthusiast. He had a
room in his house where he was storing old machines and called me in to help
him get rid of them. There were a good 2-3 hundred computers in his
collection. He had been collecting them since the 70's and for years wanted to
open up a computer museum. Old Commador PETs, Radio shack TSR-80s, all kinds
of neat stuff and most of it was still working. When he contacted me, his
health was failing and he just wanted to clear it out. I tried to save as much
of the older machines as I could for resale, but most of it ended up being
recycled.

------
rickdale
I am better now that I prefer faster hard drives, but in the past I suffered
from hoarding computer files. I still have TV quality files in addition to my
blu ray dvd's and my hdtv downloads. It's like any file that I could find I
would think to myself, if I on a remote island I would watch/use that!

Honestly coming to grips with it is terrifying and I wish I had every file I
have ever come across to this day, but I don't and there are too many more to
get to be worried about the ones I had.

~~~
foobarian
The nice thing about files is that they don't take up (much) physical space. I
still have all my files going back to 1993 when I built my first PC. The
process is easy: wait for disk sizes to double, copy old disk image to new
disk, repeat.

~~~
lotsofcows
Your hoarding problem is more socially acceptable than the one in the article.

~~~
pavel_lishin
It's also physically healthier and more affordable.

------
aestra
Do you guys think hoarding has something to do with the consumerist culture we
live in today?

What's with the downvote? It was merely a question to spark discussion about
the topic at hand. I am really interested in people's opinion on this. Is that
really offensive or counterproductive or not on topic to ask a question and
solicit opinions? If you think the answer to the question is "no" then just
say so. If you find this comment unproductive, please explain why.

~~~
gwern
> Do you guys think hoarding has something to do with the consumerist culture
> we live in today?

I think this is hard to answer because of the staggering increase in per-
capita income over the past 4 centuries or so: at most points in history, only
the most wealthy people would even hope to physically accumulate anything
close to what a hoarder might.

There weren't hoarders back then because no-one could _afford_ to be a
hoarder. Newspapers? Dear by the sheet of paper. Knick-knacks? You don't have
any money left over after food and rent. Clothes? You could only afford 1 or 2
outfits, and if you somehow had more, you'd be forced to sell all your excess
to the local mercer or ragpicker the next time you got into financial trouble.
You can see this in the occasional inventory or will: even nobles had
shockingly small numbers of goods. (I think sometimes of Shakespeare willing
his second-best bed to his wife; who would even mention any bed, much less the
second-best one, in their will these days?)

------
j_lev
Former deceased estates "furniture removalist" here.

The horders I dealt with during my tour of duty had already passed to the next
world, but you still had to protect yourself mentally each morning lest you go
crazy/question existence/get depressed/etc (happened to a couple of people I
worked with, although I don't rule out the possibility that crazy is attracted
to this kind of work). For each item in every bedside table, every piece of
furniture, every picture, every computer, you had to put aside the memories
the deceased person may have had, the reason the deceased held onto the item
until the end, the data contained within and make a split-second decision: box
or barrel.

Barrels were massive rusted oil drums that we used for collecting garbage.
Boxes were used to transport the salable "smalls" for auction. If you were
caught considering the saleability of an item for too long you'd soon hear
your boss's voice from across the room, "barrel it!"

One time I came across a pair of filing cabinets filled to the brim with
research and lecture notes on Egypt and the hieroglyphics. I had already
pieced together parts of this person's life to form an image of them - old-
money spinster who traveled the world lecturing and having adventures,
including sneaking in to China from Hong Kong in 1976 - and their life work
was contained in these filing cabinets.

"We can probably get fifty bucks a piece for the filing cabinets; barrel the
rest"

For a team of three, two hours per room was budgeted, so everything that was
dear to a person over the course of their 70-year life would usually be
processed within two days.

Regarding hoarders, the main differences between a dead hoarder and a living
one are 1) the fact that you don't have to deal with the emotion as per the
OP, and 2) there is no superficial "cleanup" the day before the cleaners
arrive. The house is exactly as the hoarder left it as no-one thinks the day
before they die, "If I were to die tomorrow I'd be _aghast_ if they found
this!"

I know this sounds ridiculous but I would expect a living hoarder would at
least manage to dispose of the bucket of feces and used tampons next to the
couch if they knew some cleaners were coming. Even hoarders have pride,
y'know.

The house with the bucket of tampons was the stuff of legend. Even today, 15
years later, if I were to contact my former boss for a beer it wouldn't be
long before the story of that place came up. Along with the tampon-and-poo
bucket, the final defacation of the former resident in the sweat-crusted
outline on the green velvet couch where the they had spent their final moments
is still a vivid memory. The stench, using shovels to scrape up the person's
life from where it was stuck to the carpet and fill barrel after barrel, my
boss's sense of humour ("whaddaya suppose she used _this_ for?!"), how quiet
everyone was on the ride back to the office, showering for an hour afterwards.

Understandably, after working this job for a while I went through an extremely
minimalist phase. Even now I pause before most non-consumable purchases. I
keep nothing that I wouldn't want someone finding when I die.

I think while many hoarders fear the memories of the past being forgotten,
HNers tend to fear being forgotten themselves.

Of course as per the OP, there were good parts to this job too! The pay, for
starters, was decent. And discovering some bondage equipment or some naked
polaroids of the former resident and their girlfriend was always good for a
chuckle and a reminder to stop taking yourself so seriously and enjoy life a
bit more.

~~~
j2kun
It seems like there should be a service for the interesting documents to go to
historians or something. Then they can take their time going through it to see
what has historical value and what does not, and make a non-split-second
decision.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I recall a minor plot point of Rainbows End where an entire library was being
scanned in by being put through a shredder, and the resulting stream-of-
confetti being photographed at a very high frame rate and resolution, to be
later stitched back together into a set of coherent documents.

If that technology existed and was good enough, it would be an interim
solution. Grab the data, pulp the paper.

~~~
nucleardog
Seems like a travel scanner or something attached to the top of a shredder
(differing speeds notwithstanding) to image the paper _before_ it got turned
into itty bitty pieces would be a little easier.

Really, given how cheap and easy it is to store large amounts of information
digitally I'm surprised that something like this isn't common for a lot of
cases to reduce storage costs.

How many businesses have rooms full of accounting records and receipts going
back decades that could instead be taking up a bit of space in a rack? Toss a
copy in Amazon Glacier for a penny a gigabyte so you have something off-site
and call it a day.

------
cafard
One quick point for the young among the readership: an American can accumulate
a hell of a lot without being a hoarder. I married into an extremely tidy
family--no dust on the tabletops, let alone piles of stuff on the floor. But
when I helped clean out a couple of houses, it was still a big task.

~~~
kazagistar
In order to avoid buildup, it really does take a minimalist outlook, only
purchasing things that you truly need, and constantly getting rid of things
that are not useful anymore.

------
justanotherta
Here's a nice documentary delving more into the psyche of a hoarder:

[http://vimeo.com/603058](http://vimeo.com/603058)

------
bshimmin
I loved this line: "Junk hauling is the best job for writers. Writers are not
necessarily the best junk haulers."

------
petercoolz
Can someone please explain how this works? Is the younger Mrs. B is paying
them to remove everything? Why? Do they just throw it all away?

~~~
blatherard
There's plenty of details left out but it sounded like Mrs. B was paying the
bills, but wasn't happy about it. There was a hint that Mrs. B was "sick" so
perhaps she was under doctor's orders to remove the mold/animal
feces/garbage/vermin/etc that may be present in her home. Alternatively,
sometimes people are ordered by home inspectors to clear out their homes
enough to bring them up to code or face condemnation.

The actual process is, by and large, taking everything to the dump. There do
exist some hoarders who keep clean homes and for whom an estate sale could
make sense, but many/most have homes that are pretty much garbage pits.

Source: a close relative of mine was a hoarder, and I've watched way too many
hoarding shows.

~~~
mmcwilliams
The risk of sickness, in these cases, can be a serious concern. My next door
neighbor was a hoarder, or so the neighborhood found out upon his death. He
was allowing wild animals to live in his house; along with a dog that was
located in the mess almost a week after he died.

His nephew, who ended up taking care of the cleaning and refinishing, told me
he contracted Toxoplasmosis from the accumulated animal feces. I accidentally
let that fact slip to the first cleaning crew that was working in the house
(without masks) and I didn't see them return after that.

------
atmosx
My English are poor, however I feel that the author can _play with words_ well
enough to be a writer. He surely knows how to write an article. He would be a
good writer IMHO.

~~~
poslathian
Being published in Harpers is a kind of a big deal in the writing community ;)

~~~
atmosx
Oops, sorry had no idea!

------
bmh100
A fascinating short story on the author's early year and look into the life a
hoarder. The ironic ending is delicious.

