Storage lockers a great businesses.
If you figured out what th
ey get per square foot it's often better than a downt
own office building.For What?
To store stuff that you haven't used or remember that you even have.
La Senora is away visiting family down waay south, so I am stranded so to speak in Northern California awaiting her return , load up the car with all the new acquisitions and return to some semblance of normality.
One business that I wish I had either set up or invested in, years ago, is the Mini Storage or Storage Locker business.
Seem in a land of abundance Americans have too much stuff.
Just drive around any housing tract and look into the garages while the doors are perched open.
What you will see is stuff crammed to the gills, quite often so much that they need to park their vehicles outside because the two car garage will no longer allow the sliding in of even one vehicle.
When I was closing up part of one of my businesses I had lots of studio equipment, I kept it because foolishly I thought that at some time I would set up a studio in Mexico to do voice overs, or other customer production that would fetch me some spare change
.In my hunger for adventure I had socked away several audio consoles. And audio console is a large board with meters and a knob for each audio input source. The one pictured here was one of the ones I was saving to use at some future time. I have a lot of emotional ties to it because it just happened to be the same type console of the radio station where I first started my radio journey. That was in 1965.
I was fortunate to find one years ago in pristine condition and purchased it to be the centerpiece of my studio that I would someday build.
Well, fast forward a few decades, to 2010.
No longer is any mixing done on this type of console, since everything is digital. Now you do it all on a computer keyboard and a mouse.
I guess I could use it to control the input to my stereo amplifier at home.
Let's see, I could connect the Television audio to input 3, my Ipod to input 4, the Internet radio to input 5, the CD player to 6 so on and so one.
The only problem would be that my wife would go bonkers having this thing in our living room, since it is about 5 ft wide and weighs about 100 lbs.
I wonder how my living room would look if I was single again. Let's see, the console would be on one large table, the work bench on the other, probably a few satellite receivers and the ham radio stuff on the other area. Easily I could nest into a space now taken up by furniture.
Well that will happen when hell freezes over at this point. Mainly because the bane of my existence, Technology has forced out another stockpile of gear that brought many hours of enjoyment and employment way back in time.
Since now what was a room full of equipment is all done a server and couple of flat screen monitors, I need to get rid of more stuff from my storage unit.
I placed a listing on Ebay for a couple of items and sadly very few aficionados of past technology applied for the honor of getting my stuff.
Perfectly good and working Color Video Monitor made by Tektronics in the dumpster.
And vintage RCA stereo cassette recorder unit, same thing.
My record turntable did bring some cash in. Seems there are collectors or audiophiles that hunger for something to play their vinyl.
I had bids from Hong Kong, Germany, Japan and Korea.
The winning bid was from a chap in San Francisco. At least I wont have to pack the unit and it will give me a reason to drop down into the city to deliver it and meet the savior of the unit.
Maybe I should have got to my projects a little sooner before the steamroller of technology flattened out all my dreams........
What I thought I was going to do in Mexico kind of all got changed. I had plans of setting up a workshop in order to play with my stuff. I enjoy working with my hands, fixing equipment, building things, etc.
Now the things that I enjoy more is reading and sitting around the plaza watching people and the world go by, while ingesting some dark strong coffee.
