Therapy for thingamabob hoarders. This site is dedicated to the collectors of doodads, gizmos and thingamabobs who want to come to grips with the stuff they have collected. It's therapy, it's science. It's thience... or scerapy. Whatever you call it, we need to do it.
Doodads defined. The dictionary definition for doodad, gizmo and thingamabob are roughly equivalent: 'something unspecified whose name is either forgotten or not known.' We might add to this, "that average people collect and stuff in an out of the way place like a kitchen drawer."
Where do doodads, gizmos live? In kitchen drawers, bottom drawers in your TV room, empty plastic pails in your shop, a tackle box - people get inventive with their neurosis.
- Step one- Acknowledge you are a gizmo hoarder. Acknowledge you have a junk drawer that is full of stuff you can't bear to throw away. Perhaps when you tucked them in your doodad drawer you did so because you were enamored of the negative entropy they represented. Or perhaps they simply contained an odd sense of beauty that made it impossible for you to commit them to death by landfill. Or maybe you actually thought you would use them someday. Whatever the case, six months later you were clueless as to what they were and what they did. And yet you still can't throw them out.
- Step two- Get involved. There are two ways to do this: 1) Send me a photo of your gizmo, so that I can ask the world what it is, and 2) keep checking the blog to see if you can identify the gadgets that appear there.
- Step three- Tell us a story about it. There are two ways to do this: 1) send it to me, and I will post it, or 2) after I post the picture you send, tell us a story about it in the comments section of the blog post.
Gizmo size. While I am enamored of the smaller DG&Ts that collect in smaller out of the way places, like drawers, shoe boxes and spent yogurt containers, feel free to send me images of anything of any size as long as you feel it qualifies as a doodad (gizmo, gadget, thingamabob, etc.).
Prepping the image. Set it on a white piece of paper and put a ruler next to it so it is clear how big it is. Please send just one image.
Testimonials are inevitable. None yet, as we just started. But I feel certain in the not-too-distant future someone will write in to say, "When I finally realized that the metal thing that looked like a small foot with claw toes was part of a commercial juicer that belonged to an ex-spouse, I threw it out. When I did so, it suddenly felt like the weight of the world levitated off my shoulders.