during my time selling on craigslist i met some interesting people. two of them, we’ll call bonnie and clyde, were a husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend or just two people that may possibly have been methheads i really can’t say for sure. i never felt threatened by them but they were crazy af.
i had a number of older dell poweredge 11th gen servers like 310s, 410s, 610s, 710s and it was time for them to go. i found a recycler by me that would pay up to .12c lb which, fine, they do whatever they do with it, and im helping save the planet (lol). but bonnie and clyde had other plans.
my first interaction with them they wanted all of it. all my old shit. and i thought that was something else. we picked a place and we met up. im waiting for them and i see this absolute beat to shit black malibu circle into the parking lot. the front bumper was held on by duct tape. it was missing the driver side mirror, just wires dangling about. i dont judge, i really could gaf less, as i too have had cars like that back in the day. my first was was a 1700 piece of shit itself and it lasted me almost 10 years. i remember the sales guy saying for 1300 more all theyd fix all the dents and dings but i was like 1300 who tf can afford that im already buying the car on a credit card my guy.
lets get back on track. so i meet clyde first and hes an older gentleman, disheveled, clothes are raggedy and hes smoking a cigarette and has an odd smell. ok fine. bonnie had the passanger window down also smoking a cigarette. as we talk i notice the interior of the car is completely beat to shit. ripped seats stains garbage everywhere cigarettes on the floor. all the good stuff.
clyde launches into this whole thing about how his son saw my craigslist post and said for him to get as much of it as he could. he didnt care how old it was and theyd have a use for it. i was happy to offload older servers and they were happy to take them.
this happened several times.
i would not say this was a friendship, but over several months we developed a repour so to speak and things were cool. i learned about their son, their hardships, their struggles, and i felt for them. ive been there.
then i asked a question that was probably dumb of me.
what do you do with all this stuff?
it turns out him, his friend, his son, and his now learned girlfriend as he was still married but they dont talk anymore and its complicated but ive moved on and now bonnies the love of my life situation, had a place up in the mountains. and up in the mountains they used large vats of acid to try and remove the gold from the servers.
what the fuck?
he went on to tell me how what they were doing is completely illegal but his friend lives in the woods so they are able to get away with it. i have no idea what kind of acid they used, but i just thought of the roger rabbit movie dipping the cartoons into acid, except with servers. and i wasnt far off.
after they did whatever the fuck they did, they would bring it to someone else who would take them. except that someone else would no longer take them because they didnt have driver licenses. so this whole time im meeting these people, the entire time they werent able to drive but were driving. what the fuck?
that someone, whoever the fuck it was, refused to take in anymore of the servers. so these people were taking the older hardware, bringing it to a secluded place, removing all of the electronic components, dumping them in barrels of acid to get gold off the plates, and then trying to sell the scrap metal.
what the actual fuck?
that was our last interaction. i think about them from time to time, they were good people. meth heads or not. but the more look back on it, how much could they have really been getting off the extracted gold, if they even were able to get any gold off things. do the servers even have gold???? idfk. theres a side of me that thinks i was aiding in their drug habit and it made me feel not so great. but i couldnt be sure. sure they were missing some teeth. sure they were pale. but does that automatically make someone a meth head?
does burning server electronics in the woods in vats of acid sound like a good business model? idfk.
gold chasing, acid dipping, scrap metal selling bonnie and clyde.
they were probably meth heads.
maybe.
idfk. they didnt kill me so thats a plus? i guess? maybe im being too harsh.
maybe they werent meth heads.
idfk.