Researchers Find Clues to 'Pack-Rat' Urge

WebMD Medical News ^ | Dec. 17, 2004 | Miranda Hitti

[firebrand]

Having worked for book publishers for many years, I was always unable to resist free copies of collectible books--found among the piles on the windowsills or file cabinets.

Most of the authors came to NYC for book signings, so it was a simple matter to get them signed too. A night of entertainment at Barnes & Noble and you walk away a few hundred dollars richer. But now I can't figure out what to do with them. Just keep them, I guess.

[angkor]

Royal Enfield?

You can buy a nice used 250cc Enfield in Nepal or India for about $300 to $500. What's really great is that you can get parts and service anywhere, since they're indigenous Indian bikes and (I think) still in production.

Someone was importing them to the U.S. a few years ago.

[angkor]

No, I sold everything Leary some time ago.

Michael was a great guy to deal with, and was Leary's archivist and founder of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library in SFO. I haven't spoken with him in at least 10 years.

[buried alive]

Doesn't sound too bad. My husband has enough parts for a 57 chev to build one from scratch. Why keep all that stuff and just let is sit there and rust?

[MinuteGal]

I'll bet those homes filled with thousands of books smell real good, LOL. Especially if some are infested with little pulp-eating insects.

Leni

[CORedneck]

Pack-ratters can also be bad at work. When I was a Sys Admin on one project, we had one guy whose office was a pigs pen. There was no desk surface because of papers, books, magazines stacked to 6 inches high. He had a Sun Sparc 20 on his desk (pizza box) and every several months, his hard drives would go belly up so the drives had to be replaced. After the drive failed the second time, I told him no work will be done in his cube until he cleaned up his crap and make space for me to work.

In that job, I was also in charge of a lab as well. I keep the place clean but this person, he and I would constantly butt heads because he always wanted to dump his junk in there. I also got rid of a lot of stuff of unused and outdated software such as dated to 1980 (this was 1997). Unfortunately, I had to get his permission to get rid of unneeded and unused stuff. He refused to sign the paperwork to get rid of it and I had to go over his head to get the approval. It p*ssed him off.

[Tokra]

and stuff like boxes for toys he'd bought his kids for Christmas 20 years ago.

....and he'll be darned glad he did. I deal in antique and collectible toys- the box is usually worth 3 times the value of the toy. Many people saved the toy, not many saved the box it came in - supply and demand.

[TheOtherMonk]

I am coining the disease with a name: “Obsessive Pathological Dementia"