Re: Found Kindle Fire at Goodwill
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
— Arthur C. Clarke
Purchase: Goodwill Pound Store: Kindle Fire Model 4, Price: $2.68 (the price is by the pound!)
The new bins come out. After the flurry of activity from the regular pickers, picking, scurrying and tossing items, then running to their cart or to check out and then stand in line for the next round, I saunter behind them to see what was left. I never try to compete. I am there for the books anyway. Though, with my generalist knowledge what may be good items, I can certainly find the rough cubic zirconia in the heaps.
I did that day, it was covered with kid stickers, I see a clean black sleek screen, about the size of a paperback book. On the back it reads Amazon. Someone donated a Kindle Fire? The pickers missed this? I test it, it would not turn on, and I could find the charger. For price of electronics at the pound store, (less than a $1.00 a pound) I can take it home and test it out. If it does not work, I can take it somewhere to get it recycled. Really recycled, not just to take it back to Goodwill and let them deal with more broken tech. (Note: Goodwills and other thrift stores do not want your broken items)
I know I have some kind of charger at home. We all have plenty of chargers, this is what Apple has told new iPhone purchasers recently, “No more chargers for you. To save money and the earth, your brand spanking iPhone will be sans a charger. Deal with it. We know you will.” To find the charger at the pound store, well good luck with that. Mountains of stuff to sift through. I am sure the employees at the thrift store would have told me, “You have plenty of chargers at home. Deal with it”. I have chargers. I can deal with it.
It has taken hours (hours) to juice the Kindle to life. I get it to boot up. To my surprise (holy crap) there is an email account attached to it. Rule on selling or donating any of your tech items is to wipe it and reset it to factory settings. This is important. It is bad enough that large corporations are keeping tabs on you because you clicked “Agree”, you just don’t want some random purchaser of your old tech to know your reading or game habits. Just erase it.
Finding someone’s email or information on found tech can be exhilerating and scary. What would you find? treasure, porn, a second set of cooked bank accounts from an embezzler, a manuscript of a book, Russian secrets? Who knows? One’s mind is a buzz with possibilities. But in the end, you just don’t want that responsibility this kind of knowledge. Unless the manuscript has reached some kind of copyright, public domain thing, then it is yours. But, karma or Stephen King will get you if you publish it as your own work.
I have found people’s tech before and have had luck returning their items to them. I am very lucky myself that nine times out of ten I get back my items that I have either have dropped or misplaced. (I will write about scaring my neighbors when someone found one of my backpacks in a sketchy part of town) So my thinking is that I need to share in this magical karma that I have and find this Kindle’s owner.
I have the email, but I don’t have the password, to open the Kindle, so I send an email to the owner.
Re: Found Kindle Fire at Goodwill
Hello *****,
You do not know me, My name is Roxanne and I found a Kindle Fire while shopping at the Goodwill Pound store in Jacksonville. It was not juiced up, but I took a chance on purchasing the device. There was no charger yet found one at home. I got it home and let it charge up. When charged, your email popped up on the Home Screen as well as ******, perhaps your son.
I want to make sure that you did in fact donate the item (it was not erased to factory settings. Something to do when reselling or donating) or it was a mistake and you would like it returned. This I would happily do.
Please let me know.
Kind regards,
Roxanne A. Henkle
Spazhouse,
Intuitive Research and Design
________________________________________________________
A half an hour later, I received a very quick reply.
__________________________________________________________
No ma’am it was stolen while we were moving and we thought it was gone.
However if you got it I hope it goes to a kid and they have a lot of fun with it.
The digit code should be *******. (see what I did there? I added asterisks for this post to hide the password)
Please wipe it to factory settings and I hope you got a great deal on it.
_____________________________________________________________
I replied back
Are you sure? I would be very happy to mail it to you. I got a good deal out of it and I know the value of the item and what it means to your family.
I dislike thieves.
Kind regards,
Roxanne A. Henkle
_______________________________________________________________
The victim of this theft then ghosted me. I was a bit sad for the child whose tablet this was, it was used well and decorated in stickers like any proud child decorating the brown paper book covers we had to have on our school books. (I am dating myself here) Children sense that coating your tech in stickers keeps the items from getting scratches. (Every Apple product I own has a sticker skin on it) I can remember as a child losing something and the sadness and anxiety over the loss of something that may cost lot of money to my parents. My hope is that the child was not blamed in the beginning for misplacing it.
Since I could not to pursue returning the item, I now have this Kindle Fire. It’s a 4th edition. Slower than my iPad. I am at a loss at what to do with it. But, what is mind boggling is that we as a society, through the nudging of big tech companies has made us disregard the magic that these tech items brings to us. We have the world’s largest reference library in our hands. We are walking around with the Library of Alexandria inthe palms of our hands. We can unload some of our stored knowledge, (the items in our head) knowing that we can, with a few swipes and taps find the information we need. This was new, then the newness wears off very quickly. We become complacent.
Back in the day kids, computer technology was expensive, especially in the 80s and 90s. I can go on with the history of the price of tech as I was an art director in the printing industry and can tell you that adding ram to a desktop could set you back thousands of dollars. Now that Handheld devices have dropped so much, that this owner of the device would rather obtain a new one than get back a perfectly functioning, well used device. Planned obsolescence is a reality, but I will give the dad space as the family may have needed to replace it quickly due to COVID and having to deal with remote learning.
My new thought then turned to why would a thief donate the Kindle Fire to Goodwill? It makes no sense, unless the thief could not break the code and certainly could not pawn it (pawn shops do look for tell tale clues if an item has been stolen) or for some weird circumstance did not have a charger at home. Karma. To appease the karma gods, the thief then donates the now sad, Amazon Kindle decorated with stickers to Goodwill. The Goodwill pickers, miss the item (it was coated in stickers) for their online sales and just pitched it to the bins at the pound store. Where, under the piles of clothes and other unwanted items it catches my eye.
If you like this article and are in the need of a Kindle Fire (4th edition — kind of slow cleaned of stickers) message me and I can arrange to send you this lovely item (Free but, if you can cover shipping that would be great) set to factory setting to you. Please note this Kindle Fire does not come with charger. I know you have one at home. We all have them.
