Perhaps a floppy disk doesn’t seem so much of an anachronism. Well, how about a single-tape answering machine? Mine wasn’t just any single tape answering machine; it was an AT&T 2600. It had been thrown away by Charlie, an old smokestack of a man my former boss occasionally had business with. Does it matter that I was 19 at the time? Nah. This could just as easily have happened three days ago.

“Charlie, what’s wrong with this answering machine?” I asked, having spotted the sad, forlorn thing peering up at me from his trash can. Charlie pulled the cigarette from his cracked lips and rasped,

“Nothing. I got a new one. You want it? You can have it.”

At this point in my life, I was living in my parent’s basement and, as such, actually did have a need for an answering machine to service a new phone line I had recently installed as part of a futile attempt at feigning independence. So I took it home, put a tape in it and proceeded to use it for the next eight years. It could play back messages to you over the phone if you punched in the right number and, lucky for me, that magic number was printed on the belly of the thing. I remember calling it at various times during the day, listening to my own recorded pleas for callers to leave a message, and then I would punch in that number. Usually, there were no messages, but I just loved the act of using that old machine. Lord help me, I would actually tell people about that thing as if it were a pet! I’d go on at length about how reliable it was and how it used a full-size cassette so I’d never have to buy one of those micro things that cost twice as much. People who actually called me would get annoyed because of the excessive length of its screeching beep. Sometimes it seemed to become confused and would play its tape to whomever might have called me; on these occasions it was likely to play old messages which had been long forgotten. This quite disturbed my girlfriend Heather (now my wife) when it once played to her a lengthy message left me by an old lover two years earlier.

Very embarrassing, but nothing was bad enough to make me discard my beloved answering machine. It wasn’t until earlier this year that I came home from work to discover a new machine in its place. My fiancé had thrown my trusty, old, faux wood-grain AT&T2600 away andreplaced it with a sleek, green, metallic, tapeless, digital answering machine... It works... I guess... I’m not angry at Heather for throwing it away. But I will never love this new machine like I loved that 2600, which had loyally performed its job years after it should have been thrown away. I can no longer proudly tell people about how old my answering machine is, how I fished it out of the garbage, or about its economical, full-sized cassette tape. This new answering machine will never have a story to tell.

Come to think of it, all my beloved anachronistic possessions have had stories to tell. Even my first air-conditioner had its own story. When I was 24 I purchased a house. A modest home, it was a little post-war, cheese-box bungalow built in 1959 with no basement; it was all I could afford. No longer merely feigning independence, I was on my own, but without an air-conditioner. It was a very warm summer that year, and I was getting tired of sitting in my boxers, on a towel, on the floor of my living room, watching television and wiping the sweat off my forehead. Visiting me one day, my stepfather told me that it was “hot enough to curdle water” in my little house. I was unclear as to how that metaphor worked, but was nonetheless attentive as he told me about a certain air conditioner.

“I bought it in ‘74 and it broke in ‘75,” he began, “By the time I got around to taking it to Montgomery Wards to get it fixed I had moved into an apartment complex with central air. I got the compressor replaced anyway, and it’s been sitting in Ma’s attic ever since.”

Oh, the romance of it! A 21 year old air conditioner that was, paradoxically, brand new! I loved it before I even met it. In all haste I grabbed Heather and drove down to my grandmother’s Polish, Detroit neighborhood and ventured up into the musty old attic to retrieve the precious cooling unit. There it was, snug in its floral-print cardboard box, circa 1975 Montgomery Wards. The box was open on top, and there was a yellowed,, old newspaper covering the unit itself. We drove it home, lugged it in, and hooked it up in the living room. That lovable, old, chilly beast drew so much current that all the lights throughout the house would dim whenever the compressor kicked in. It easily kept the entire first floor cool and ran quietly that entire summer. I couldn’t stop telling people about it and frequently found excuses to bring it up in conversation time and time again. It was my brand-new 1975 air conditioner, keeping a house cool so far past its expected running life that it gave an entirely new definition to the phrase, “durable goods.” Unfortunately, its renaissance was short lived. Two years later, I replaced my furnace and had a central air unit installed in my house. The original furnace was as old as the house, and badly in need of replacement; the central air unit was a logical addition to the purchase at the time. Now the house is comfortable and the electric bills are more affordable, but....it’s somehow not the same.

But not all my favorite anachronisms are retired or out of service like the AT&T2600 or that air conditioner unit, though. No, I need look no farther than my laundry room for confirmation of that point. Along with that furnace, my house came equipped with a washer and dryer. I didn’t think much of them at first; they were just these old, pea-green, steel monsters in the utility room. I even speculated that I would likely replace them as soon as I could afford the expense. Predictably, I soon fell in love with them. I first suspected I had found something special in these appliances when I discovered the original manuals for them atop the utility closet. Look at the bell-bottoms and banana curls on those happy young models--why, they’d be middle-aged people by now! My, but the fonts looked funky in that two-color printout. Big, blue and lighter-blue flowers decorated the cover, and inside were care and use instructions that the “busy housewife” could follow in order to make her life a little easier. Rapturous! Then, I found the original warrantee card for the set. From the date on that card I determined that these appliances, these glorious, green monuments of domestic tranquility, were older than my wife, and not much younger than I! Not only that, but they actually worked! How could I not love them? They still squat happily in my laundry room, faithfully scrubbing our clothes for us and then drying them respectively. Five years have passed since I bought this house, and I have only had to replace a belt in the washer and an electric gas igniter in the dryer. I would gladly spend far more to keep my precious washer and dryer set going.

There is, in me, a deep fondness for things, like that washer and dryer set that keep going when no one would expect them to. There is, likewise, a deep affection for things that are being used to reliably perform some task that they would not be expected to be able to do. Sometimes an object combines both of these properties; that is when I am most likely to become infatuated. One such item is a certain hard working computer at a medium sized multinational client of mine. It is an old Gateway Pentium 75Mhz, which is now five and a half years old. Dwelling inside this computer is a seven year old, full-height, 5.25", 1GB hard drive and accompanying controller. For those who are not technical, suffice it to say that this is an old computer with an even older hard drive. This machine handles every single Internet message sent into, or out of, that company’s network. Its name is HQIMail, and it has performed this job for four years. HQIMail handles over 15,000 messages a day, a fact I know well because it sends me a report every morning to tell me how it’s been doing. It is now older than any other computer in the main building. It may be older than any computer in that company. I think about HQIMail all the time, and he makes me happy.

What is it that makes me love these....things? The examples go on and on. Examples such as my car, so small yet so capable. Or my old AOC television, which I rescued from a TV repair shop for $125-just look at that picture, I would say to anyone visiting my house! I could talk at length about my Fischer stereo amplifier, which even now is playing jazz for my pleasure, eight years after I bought it from a clearance rack. Gladly, I would talk the ear off any unfortunate passersby about my 1952 Baldwin piano if given half a chance. I love its ugly, plain, Bauhaus-esque shape, and loud, bright tone, but I couldn’t define why, exactly.

I don’t think it’s possible to ask why anyone loves anything, since love itself is a confusing idea that cannot be defined well. The fact remains that I have these, well, crushes on things. I experience childish infatuations with whatever is around me, and it happens again and again. It’s still happening. I fell in love with this rolling table-thing in my shop at work today.... but that’s another story.