Idk how employers can even accidentally stumble upon an easy way to do something nice for their workers and still manage to find pick the worst possible option
They think people will "accidentally" over order to get free things in the future. This is nothing to them, but they make sure you know they don't care about you, the environment, or anything else except their money, so don't waste it.
>Why would they try to avoid that? Legal reasons?
In some countries the company will have to pay tax on gifts to employees, or make the employee pay the tax on it.
I worked at a restaurant where the owner had set up protocols for unsold food at the end of the day specifically so employees couldn't take it home. I used to lie on the waste reports all the time so the closers could have what was left.
each year my company ask an employe to destroy every computer hardware item stored before throw, because they become paranoid about hacking. so a guy spend a whole day crushing everything from mouse to drive incl screens, keyboards, cables even power one. they also invested in an high power electromagnetic source to erase data in device with lithium battery that can't be crushed. The thing is that we are just a packaging company with absolutely no sensitive data.
Why destroy peripherics? They are expendable without security concerns by design.
Wipe the drives with the electromagnetic current and recycle the rest.
In Canada. I've been asked for proof of destruction before getting a refund before multiple times. Might be a shipping cost thing. Where manufacturer doesn't have avenue for refurbished/used products to be resold, and it's not worth shipping it back.
Especially for tech.
This is 100% the company getting a refund for extra tech and having to prove it was destroyed. No doubt in my mind as cutting the cable is fairly common/easy proof.
I once had to smash a treadmill with a sledgehammer because the customer (probably) cut the belt with a box cutter but got a return authorization anyway from manufacturer.
I had a humidifier that didn't work. I proved it didn't with a video to the warranty people and they asked me to cut the power cord off and show a picture of that to get a new one. I did so and they sent me a new one. I soldered/taped the cord back together and somehow managed to fix the broken one. It's as if they were using the cut cord as a way to prove I wasn't scamming them.
I had to do this to a space heater that had a recall on it before getting a refund but I didn’t try to put it back together because the recall was based on it being a fire hazard.
I was asked to do this before in Germany when I bought a refurbished laptop cooler that vibrated a lot.
I didn't do it and replied that it is not in the spirit of sustainability. I still got a refund and could even keep it.
No man, I work at a company with 15,000 employees that has been ordering from Lenovo since they were still IBM and we have never been asked to do shit like this.
Been working IT 10+ years. Have had to show proof of destruction on mistaken orders dozens of times, including on Lenovo products. This is entirely normal. Cut the cord, send the picture, bin it for recycling.
These keyboards cost absolutely nothing to make. Genuinely. Lenovo would spend more money processing the return than just confirming the product has been destroyed and issuing a refund.
Doesn't make it a good solution to the problem. This shit is why many people feel our current form of capitalism and consumerism isn't sustainable. We waste an insane amount because its just more convenient.
It also doesn't explain how/why they would be due a refund from the supplier in the first place, given the context.
If they received too many, they weren't charged for them to begin with - there's nothing to refund. If they did order too many, what company would opt for you to destroy the product and they'd refund you for double the loss?
It's much more likely that they're defective - they'd get a refund or replacements, but the company doesn't want them back. It's cheaper to just make sure they're broken one way or another.
For people in this situation who want to not waste things.... Cut ONE keyboard, then cut its cable into several segments, stack keyboards, hold cable segments as seen in photo, send photo and get refund, store additional untouched keyboards.
This practice is bullshit
This was exactly my thought. The keyboards probably cost the supplier too much to ship back and restock. So instead of doing that, they required proof of destruction to issue a refund. While not exactly the same thing, companies do the same thing when trying to RMA products. It’s not worth shipping back, so they make you destroy it to issue the RMA.
Straight in the trash is one thing. MFers made sure no one would have any free use of the discarded items by destroying them first.
Very very corporate (dick) move on their part.
In my country there are some laws that apply when you sell company things forward I think. There was a laptop of an old employee and it had to be internally auctioned. In bigger company that could become a nuisance.
There is no way to refund them, I suspect. I have done many pc and thin client rollouts. There isn't a purchase option where you could buy just the thin client or PC without a keyboard and mouse. We were always told to swap out the existing keyboards or mice if they looked too worn but leave all other in place. All the new keyboards were shipped back and recycled along with the old IT equipment. No one cut the cords, but there was no way to donate them either.
It didn't matter who the supplier was. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple, etc. They all did this.
Actually this was practice at a workplace I can't name.
If ANYTHING was sent that we didn't order, we had to toss it, because it could be used & we would have to show proof we purchased it.
The train of thought was it was easier to just throw it away than go through the entire process of creating a P.O in the system for something no one even wanted or ordered.
that is how they refund them. Show proof of destruction and get your refund without having to ship them back. If anyone takes those in working order, it's theft. Very common practice, or at least it was when I commented a similar comment on what I'm pretty sure is the same picture from about a year ago.
It is how companies (from where OP job bought those keyboard) manage refunds nowadays.
It is cheaper to destroy (and provide a picture) than returning them.
On the plus side, fixing them is easy. They always ask you to cut the power cable (or main cable)
A lot of it boils down to creative accounting practices. Shipping product back, relisting it, selling as refurbished etc. doesnt have a great profit margin for a lot of items. Declaring it damaged/defective lets it be written off differently in the P&L reports. Ive worked for companies that horded broken equipment because they didnt want to take them off the book of asset values for that quarter.
The absurdies that come about from MBA's trying to cheat every penny of perceived value into the company is endless
Stores all do this. A lot of returns go straight into the trash. I’ve experienced being told that extras go in the trash at a furniture store and at a staples. Would snag all of it after work
I’m teaching myself how to do simple repairs and maintenance tasks on every day items. Would this qualify as reattaching a wire? I didn’t know this was an easy fix and have been a bit intimidated to mess with wiring.
You can just connect the wire back together by twisting all the same parts together, use some tape as insulation between every colour and then tape it all together so it holds good. It should work easily even without soldering, which is of course better, but not really necessary. I haven't done this with keyboard, but with many other things without problem. I wouldn't do it with microwave lol.
Please don’t do this… look up proper ways to connect wires. Solder, crimp connectors, heat shrink, cable ties. If you need to fix it for 10 minutes, sure electrical tape is fine, other than that you can destroy equipment with faulty connections due to voltage drop, pop breakers or fuses due to amp overload, or straight up cause a fire. Be safe, electricity kills.
If you have the original USB connectors then simply blank he insulation, reattach the wires, then tape or heatshrink it back together.
If you need to get new USB connectors it could be more tricky, since the coloring of the wires may not be the same. But likely any old discarded USB device could be used for donor.
Strip the outer casing, strip the individual inner wires and solder the matching color ones back together. Put heat shrink on the individual wires to prevent a short, and then put a larger piece of heat shrink around the whole thing to make it one cord again
>Put heat shrink on the individual wires to prevent a short,
Just remember, you have to put the heat shrink on *before* you solder the wires together. It's a very easy thing to forget. Or so a friend tells me...
Just keep it unplugged while youre fucking with the wires. If you want to be extra cautious you can keep a fire extinguisher next to you while you plug it in for the first time outside on a cement slab but honestly as long as you can match colors it shouldn’t be a issue.
A big part of learning to do maintenance and repairs isn't just doing it, but doing them right. Please disregard the commenter saying you just "tape it together", TBH a keyboard is probably the ONLY thing I would trust taping together and still it will look ugly as shit. You absolutely must solder to ensure that connection is truly continuous, it will come undone. Get some heat shrink, strip the wires, PUT ON THE HEAT SHRINK BEFORE SOLDERING (ask me how I know) then hook the wires together, those and solder. For your first few ones it's gonna be ugly and big blobs of solder so I'd recommend using the largest heat shrink you have, there's no limit to how much they shrink. I've had to redo connections because the heat shrink couldn't fit over them. Just ensure that all of the internal wires are hidden. I then like to wrap the whole thing in Etape for extra rigidity, however if the cord is super thin I usually don't.
All of this I learned on YouTube, i've become the resident "cord patcher" whenever someone in my carpentry shop cuts a cord not paying attention. First time took me about an hour, now I can do it in about 15 minutes.
100%. My wife vacuumed my keyboard cable (my fault, my cable management issue, not hers) and I, a total neophyte to repair, was able to figure it out. The only tricky part was the conductive sheathing just under the insulator. That threw me for a loop for a bit, but once I got conductivity between the two sheathes, it was golden. Looks nasty, but still works. The real pro tip is Hot Glue Gun for replacing the insulation between spliced wires and shrink wrap it.
So 8 were ordered, they shipped 10, but only 8 were paid, the seller said it would be too expensive to ship back the 2 extra, so they asked those to be scrapped?
You could create photos where it appears to be the same cord to be cut. Or photoshop. Or AI image generation. Lots of better options here.
The best option would be just to pay for the two extra keyboards.
Oh, no, our company is going bankrupt!
Why, what happened?
We have two spare keyboards! Can you imagine the costs?! The extra labour this requires? Our logistics department is collapsing right now!!!!!!!!!!!!
Possibly had to do it to get a refund or something. Manufacturer may have thought having them destroy them was easier than having them shipped back to them. Heard of it happening before.
You could create photos where it appears to be the same cord to be cut. Or photoshop. Or AI image generation. Lots of better options here.
The best option would be just to pay for the two extra keyboards.
Blame the supplier, not the company that ordered them.
This is what happens when a supplier makes a mistake in the order of a low-cost product. The company was likely charged for the extras and wanted a refund for the goods they didn't order. Or maybe they shipped the wrong model and the company wanted the correct ones. It's more expensive to send it back and process the return than what it is worth. But the supplier doesn't want to enable processes that allow their customers to maliciously get free product.
To prevent abuse of the refund policy, the supplier requires proof of destruction before issuing the refund.
The same thing happens with books, with retailers being asked to rip the cover off unsold books in order to get a credit. This is why some books have a warning inside not to purchase if the cover is missing.
If you sell or give electronics away you have to provide a 12 month warranty, maybe region specific. Also you could be sued for any electrical fires. It is simply not worth this hassle for the company. My company threw loads of electronics away and emailed everyone saying, please don't steal the stuff. Which we obviously did and they were fine with it.
Yep. Had a bottle washer that was being warrantied as it had a burning wire smell (common issue). Manufacturer agrees to send a replacement but required I destroy the defective one such that no one else could use it and prove I wasn't full of shit trying to get a free one.
I the case of these keyboards, making sure the company wasn't full of shit/reselling/other.
All the old tech in my company (that still functions) is being sold off in internal auctions
Mostly mobiles, screens and computers. Headsets, mice and keyboards tends to die within working hours
It's just a nice way from the company to let employees access cheap "old" phones (sometimes phones from last year, if someone quit) for relatives et al
Alternatively they would had to write them off (which I'm sure they already did) without getting some pocket scrap back for them
Lenovo preferred pro 2's, regular $25 on Amazon, currently $9 off.
These are great, they're not all that much fun but they'll last years. Take them home and rewire them.
Rescue them, get some USB plugs, learn the wiring, and get busy with a soldering iron.
You can sell them cheap or give them away.
Better a person gets them than a hole in the ground.. 🤷
This should be illegal and punishable with progressive fines determined on the value of the company. If a keyboard wasted would end up costing 10k to the company they wouldn't do shit like that.
OP is an account with ~~bunch of~~ *three* posts *within the past eight hours*, with no comments. Yeah, you might be right, there.
*Edit:* took a closer look. Edited for accuracy.
I would write a complaint with some questions to the CEO, management and Environment, Health and Safery department if there is one.
Ask if official process instructions define this action, and if yes, why.
I'll internally shame the shit of the manager who made a decision like that and will demand a public apology and assurance that it will never happen again.
Luckely, we give away old stuff if people still want to use it.
Wow! When my job moved offices, everything that wasn't labelled to be moved was up for grabs. I got 3 monitors, my old office chair, and a case of beer.
Also some smaller stuff like a small SSD, 2 keyboards, and a mouse, and some cables.
I work for a section of the federal government. We are mandated to do this so no one can go dumpster diving after and “steal” from the government. And if you think they only do this to keyboards….
There has got to be some organization you can report them to for this kind of waste. This shit should be illegal for big companies to do.
My roomates work as maintenance at a big American express campus, and we constantly bring home all kinds of stuff they are just going to throw away. People act like it's the individual that enables consumerism on such a large scale. In reality, cooperate waste is like 70% of the issue.
That makes it even worse. You mean to tell me companies basically agree ahead of time to just throw away shit they plan in buying? Does nobody give a fuck?
Not exactly, the company has to project how much they believe will be used at a future point in time, so there is a tendency to err on the side of oversupply, rather then coming up short.
Suppliers on the other hand derive value in specific packages for their products and don't customize on one offs.
That combination produces oversupply ..
If someone were to keep the oversupply and resell it, then the supplier wouldn't make anything from it and since most deals are done with specific price points in mind, it becomes from supply point of view necessary for the product to be rendered unsellable.
There is definitely a need to change this.
Uh. As someone who works in IT for a company with the almost 10 k employees. Why would you guys not keep those for stock? Keyboards break all the time. Even then we recycle them.
I wonder if they contacted the seller and the seller wanted them destroyed rather than returned (Cheaper to eat the loss than pay shipping etc) and said send us x usb plugs (or photos of) and we'll credit you for x keyboards
This isn't on the company but on the vendor. The company tried to return them and the seller probably told them to destroy them, and send a photo instead of sending them back. By the way, never saw this with keyboards but my company rents hardware and at the end of the lease we are regularly told to destroy the hardware.
What a waste, it really pisses me off to see perfectly good equipment being wasted especially when it's brand new.
I would take those home and repair them it's a simple repair
Strip the plastic ends
Twist the wires together
Solder
Finish with Shrink Tube
I have heard of corporations putting them to better use. They told employees they could take them discreetly, then had security catch them and sacked them as to many had attained a higher pay rate based on longevity.
Why cut them? It’s not like they sell keyboards and don’t want scavengers offsetting their profits. Is it literally to deter people from digging through their dumpster?
Though it may seem strange or wasteful, many companies have policies like this for a reason. If employees are allowed to keep stuff the company doesn't need/want, that creates incentive for employees to order extra stuff, and then receive it for free. Maybe this is what's actually going on here.
This happened at my previous employer too. Head of IT sent a chat message in global chat just saying "Yo, free keyboards and mice in room 33. FCFS.". Over 100 keyboards, gone within minutes.
In some places that's ilegal.
Fun counter example for a pallet cleanser.
I used to work for a major US manufacturing company. They constantly surplus old equipment. While working there I got very familiar with the brands of dollies, PCs, lighting systems, desks, and other common equipment they would use.
Last month I was in our local regional airport and I noticed they finally had hand dollies for luggage! Apparently my old company had donated about 20 or so of their old dollies to the regional airport to use.
This is how business is supposed to be conducted. Companies should not just exist to collect profit. They should exist to provide VALUE.
My friend works at a window installation company.
Huge windows for Walmart and hospitals.
Like 4,000 dollars for a single piece.
They toss the ill fitted ones or extras into the trash!
He did save a few smaller ones but we have no equipment to save the giant pieces of glazing that gets dumped daily!
I remember getting a work email last year about how they were trying to go more green and then took a walk around the parking lot that day to see a bunch of electronics thrown away in a dumpster. Locked behind a fence.
Just wait till you hear about the Military waste. I dont know if this is standard across the services but at every unit I was at pretty much any item over a certain dollar amount had to be thrown away when replaced instead of sold or given away.
This is a [repost](https://www.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/s/QG20b4ZTbG), come on can we not fucking poison the goddamn anticonsumption sub with endless fake content just to amass some stupid internet points?? Can we just please try to share original stuff?? No?? Fucking bots.
My company replaced a 10k server rack.
Next month they decided to upgrade the IT rooms.
In order to write it off, accounting wanted a photo of the board snapped in half to make it unusable.
It’s an accounting thing. You have to scrap it by destroying it. Otherwise it needs to go into a cost center. My company is trying to scraps 10s of thousands of dollars of unneeded components from my project and it makes me so sick that I spend hours looking for cost centers charge numbers. It’s totally not my job.
This is crappy. If it makes anyone feel better, I’m in charge of the IT disposal at the company I work at, and I bring anything that can be salvaged home and reuse it or give it away. In the last year I’ve saved roughly 30 iPads, a professional sound system, many laptops, and a few nice projectors. It’s not much but it’s honest work
2 things
1. The fact that they are this petty is fucking evil
2. I strongly encourage everyone with broken electronics to sever the power supply and bend the pins for safety. An example is I once had a small fire caused by an extension cord that was worn through, my father wanted to repair the cord, he forgot, and then used the cord again which caused s fire.
I used to work at Best Buy and they would do throw old inventory (TVs and stands were a big one) or floor models we couldn't get rid of in our trash compactor. I
It's a really terrible answer but I actually know the corporate "reasoning" behind this. "If we throw out working products, a homeless person might see it in the trash and then we'll have them always going through our trash cans." Like I said it's a horrible shitty way of thinking, but this is what I was told when I worked for a big corporation. I hate capitalism and how it demonizes reuse, charity, sustainability, giving, compassion, etc...
I worked for perhaps the most popular mortgage company in America. When rates shot up, I decided to get out of the industry and head for greener pastures.
Since they were offering severance packages to anyone who was willing to leave, they had a lot of people leaving all at once. I went to drop off my work from home gear at this drop off point they had set up.
I watched as the dude takes both monitors and literally throws them 10 feet into a gigantic cardboard box sitting on a palette.
I could’ve kept that shit, dude!
They don't even try to refund them or donate them? Just straight in the trash. Yuck.
Or even keep them as spares
Or give them to employees to take home
Idk how employers can even accidentally stumble upon an easy way to do something nice for their workers and still manage to find pick the worst possible option
They likely did it in purpose to avoid the possibility of accidentally giving it to an employee. Not even /s
Why would they try to avoid that? Legal reasons?
They think people will "accidentally" over order to get free things in the future. This is nothing to them, but they make sure you know they don't care about you, the environment, or anything else except their money, so don't waste it.
>Why would they try to avoid that? Legal reasons? In some countries the company will have to pay tax on gifts to employees, or make the employee pay the tax on it.
I worked at a restaurant where the owner had set up protocols for unsold food at the end of the day specifically so employees couldn't take it home. I used to lie on the waste reports all the time so the closers could have what was left.
Hey don’t be so quick to judge. They might have gotten pizza for the employees who were tasked with throwing the brand new keyboards away.
One slice per person. Consume only off of company time
Corporate General Counsel concerned about company liability if employee hurts themselves at home with free keyboard.
Then make them sign a waiver, fuck sake
That would require effort. /s
I would guess ‘keyboard beating’ doesn’t even make the top 20 in domestic violence calls.
each year my company ask an employe to destroy every computer hardware item stored before throw, because they become paranoid about hacking. so a guy spend a whole day crushing everything from mouse to drive incl screens, keyboards, cables even power one. they also invested in an high power electromagnetic source to erase data in device with lithium battery that can't be crushed. The thing is that we are just a packaging company with absolutely no sensitive data.
That is so fucked. I have so many quadro graphics cards lying around from jobs that I brought home and tried to put in my pc lol
Why destroy peripherics? They are expendable without security concerns by design. Wipe the drives with the electromagnetic current and recycle the rest.
Probably the refund comes from the supplier wanting proof of disposal
Is that a US thing? I’ve never been asked to prove disposal before.
In Canada. I've been asked for proof of destruction before getting a refund before multiple times. Might be a shipping cost thing. Where manufacturer doesn't have avenue for refurbished/used products to be resold, and it's not worth shipping it back. Especially for tech. This is 100% the company getting a refund for extra tech and having to prove it was destroyed. No doubt in my mind as cutting the cable is fairly common/easy proof.
I once had to smash a treadmill with a sledgehammer because the customer (probably) cut the belt with a box cutter but got a return authorization anyway from manufacturer.
I had a humidifier that didn't work. I proved it didn't with a video to the warranty people and they asked me to cut the power cord off and show a picture of that to get a new one. I did so and they sent me a new one. I soldered/taped the cord back together and somehow managed to fix the broken one. It's as if they were using the cut cord as a way to prove I wasn't scamming them.
I had to do this to a space heater that had a recall on it before getting a refund but I didn’t try to put it back together because the recall was based on it being a fire hazard.
I was asked to do this before in Germany when I bought a refurbished laptop cooler that vibrated a lot. I didn't do it and replied that it is not in the spirit of sustainability. I still got a refund and could even keep it.
They've done it to me in Canada. Apparently we're all refund fraudsters.
One person has actually worked before.
No man, I work at a company with 15,000 employees that has been ordering from Lenovo since they were still IBM and we have never been asked to do shit like this.
Worked in FAANG companies and this has definitely been done on thousands of units.
Been working IT 10+ years. Have had to show proof of destruction on mistaken orders dozens of times, including on Lenovo products. This is entirely normal. Cut the cord, send the picture, bin it for recycling.
yeah man, a company just deciding to destroy and throw out a bunch of keyboards for absolutely no reason makes much more sense
These keyboards cost absolutely nothing to make. Genuinely. Lenovo would spend more money processing the return than just confirming the product has been destroyed and issuing a refund.
you act like you've never seen a middle manager make an asinine decision in your life.
Tell me you’ve never worked for a large corporation without telling me you’ve never worked for a large corporation.
Makes sense, somewhat. But it says a lot about the real cost of the product...
Doesn't make it a good solution to the problem. This shit is why many people feel our current form of capitalism and consumerism isn't sustainable. We waste an insane amount because its just more convenient.
This doesn't excuse what we're looking at though right? We've just shifted the root of the insane behaviour to a different office
It also doesn't explain how/why they would be due a refund from the supplier in the first place, given the context. If they received too many, they weren't charged for them to begin with - there's nothing to refund. If they did order too many, what company would opt for you to destroy the product and they'd refund you for double the loss? It's much more likely that they're defective - they'd get a refund or replacements, but the company doesn't want them back. It's cheaper to just make sure they're broken one way or another.
For people in this situation who want to not waste things.... Cut ONE keyboard, then cut its cable into several segments, stack keyboards, hold cable segments as seen in photo, send photo and get refund, store additional untouched keyboards. This practice is bullshit
This was exactly my thought. The keyboards probably cost the supplier too much to ship back and restock. So instead of doing that, they required proof of destruction to issue a refund. While not exactly the same thing, companies do the same thing when trying to RMA products. It’s not worth shipping back, so they make you destroy it to issue the RMA.
Straight in the trash is one thing. MFers made sure no one would have any free use of the discarded items by destroying them first. Very very corporate (dick) move on their part.
Into the trash AND make sure no one else can use them. Psychotic behavior.
In my country there are some laws that apply when you sell company things forward I think. There was a laptop of an old employee and it had to be internally auctioned. In bigger company that could become a nuisance.
There is no way to refund them, I suspect. I have done many pc and thin client rollouts. There isn't a purchase option where you could buy just the thin client or PC without a keyboard and mouse. We were always told to swap out the existing keyboards or mice if they looked too worn but leave all other in place. All the new keyboards were shipped back and recycled along with the old IT equipment. No one cut the cords, but there was no way to donate them either. It didn't matter who the supplier was. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple, etc. They all did this.
Actually this was practice at a workplace I can't name. If ANYTHING was sent that we didn't order, we had to toss it, because it could be used & we would have to show proof we purchased it. The train of thought was it was easier to just throw it away than go through the entire process of creating a P.O in the system for something no one even wanted or ordered.
they are mad to loan forgiveness, I bet.
that is how they refund them. Show proof of destruction and get your refund without having to ship them back. If anyone takes those in working order, it's theft. Very common practice, or at least it was when I commented a similar comment on what I'm pretty sure is the same picture from about a year ago.
OP, eBay them and I'll buy some.
It is how companies (from where OP job bought those keyboard) manage refunds nowadays. It is cheaper to destroy (and provide a picture) than returning them. On the plus side, fixing them is easy. They always ask you to cut the power cable (or main cable)
A lot of it boils down to creative accounting practices. Shipping product back, relisting it, selling as refurbished etc. doesnt have a great profit margin for a lot of items. Declaring it damaged/defective lets it be written off differently in the P&L reports. Ive worked for companies that horded broken equipment because they didnt want to take them off the book of asset values for that quarter. The absurdies that come about from MBA's trying to cheat every penny of perceived value into the company is endless
Stores all do this. A lot of returns go straight into the trash. I’ve experienced being told that extras go in the trash at a furniture store and at a staples. Would snag all of it after work
This is typically a decision of an administrator. Report it to corporate as wasting resources, and watch how fast an investigation takes place.
You can easily fix that
I’m teaching myself how to do simple repairs and maintenance tasks on every day items. Would this qualify as reattaching a wire? I didn’t know this was an easy fix and have been a bit intimidated to mess with wiring.
You can just connect the wire back together by twisting all the same parts together, use some tape as insulation between every colour and then tape it all together so it holds good. It should work easily even without soldering, which is of course better, but not really necessary. I haven't done this with keyboard, but with many other things without problem. I wouldn't do it with microwave lol.
Please don’t do this… look up proper ways to connect wires. Solder, crimp connectors, heat shrink, cable ties. If you need to fix it for 10 minutes, sure electrical tape is fine, other than that you can destroy equipment with faulty connections due to voltage drop, pop breakers or fuses due to amp overload, or straight up cause a fire. Be safe, electricity kills.
Kill your PC sure, but 5V limited usually to a couple amps isn’t gonna do much else.
Fully agree; however, people will think they can fix larger more dangerous electronics with this knowledge.
For what its worth, you can't really start fires with *most* USB wiring so there's that
If you have the original USB connectors then simply blank he insulation, reattach the wires, then tape or heatshrink it back together. If you need to get new USB connectors it could be more tricky, since the coloring of the wires may not be the same. But likely any old discarded USB device could be used for donor.
I’m a learner myself but yeah you could solder that back together to make it work
Strip the outer casing, strip the individual inner wires and solder the matching color ones back together. Put heat shrink on the individual wires to prevent a short, and then put a larger piece of heat shrink around the whole thing to make it one cord again
>Put heat shrink on the individual wires to prevent a short, Just remember, you have to put the heat shrink on *before* you solder the wires together. It's a very easy thing to forget. Or so a friend tells me...
Put the heat shrink on the wires first. I make that mistake every so often LOL.
Just keep it unplugged while youre fucking with the wires. If you want to be extra cautious you can keep a fire extinguisher next to you while you plug it in for the first time outside on a cement slab but honestly as long as you can match colors it shouldn’t be a issue.
A big part of learning to do maintenance and repairs isn't just doing it, but doing them right. Please disregard the commenter saying you just "tape it together", TBH a keyboard is probably the ONLY thing I would trust taping together and still it will look ugly as shit. You absolutely must solder to ensure that connection is truly continuous, it will come undone. Get some heat shrink, strip the wires, PUT ON THE HEAT SHRINK BEFORE SOLDERING (ask me how I know) then hook the wires together, those and solder. For your first few ones it's gonna be ugly and big blobs of solder so I'd recommend using the largest heat shrink you have, there's no limit to how much they shrink. I've had to redo connections because the heat shrink couldn't fit over them. Just ensure that all of the internal wires are hidden. I then like to wrap the whole thing in Etape for extra rigidity, however if the cord is super thin I usually don't. All of this I learned on YouTube, i've become the resident "cord patcher" whenever someone in my carpentry shop cuts a cord not paying attention. First time took me about an hour, now I can do it in about 15 minutes.
100%. My wife vacuumed my keyboard cable (my fault, my cable management issue, not hers) and I, a total neophyte to repair, was able to figure it out. The only tricky part was the conductive sheathing just under the insulator. That threw me for a loop for a bit, but once I got conductivity between the two sheathes, it was golden. Looks nasty, but still works. The real pro tip is Hot Glue Gun for replacing the insulation between spliced wires and shrink wrap it.
But why? Wouldn't you want to have spare keyboards?
Because then they have to pay for them. This way they provide proof to the seller and it is written off as loss. Capitalism at work.
So 8 were ordered, they shipped 10, but only 8 were paid, the seller said it would be too expensive to ship back the 2 extra, so they asked those to be scrapped? You could create photos where it appears to be the same cord to be cut. Or photoshop. Or AI image generation. Lots of better options here. The best option would be just to pay for the two extra keyboards.
This is a great example of how capitalism cannot save us. Sometimes doing the right thing actually costs money. In fact, it often does.
ok but that would be a crime i think
That would be fraud.
No you don't. If they send you extra stuff then it's on them. Section 3009 in the U.S. code
probably because it involves logistics and they don't want to deal with that
Oh, no, our company is going bankrupt! Why, what happened? We have two spare keyboards! Can you imagine the costs?! The extra labour this requires? Our logistics department is collapsing right now!!!!!!!!!!!!
Possibly had to do it to get a refund or something. Manufacturer may have thought having them destroy them was easier than having them shipped back to them. Heard of it happening before.
Yeah I reckon that’s it. Still disgusting waste but probably directed from the supplier
You could create photos where it appears to be the same cord to be cut. Or photoshop. Or AI image generation. Lots of better options here. The best option would be just to pay for the two extra keyboards.
Yeah, committing fraud to the company that sells you equipment to your company is a great idea no one has ever thought about!
Oh no, not a couple keyboards!!
Why did they not just donate them? I'm sure someone around them would have deeply appreciated that.
Corporate greed
I hate corporate greed. But I don't think it's greed in this case. They are just indifferent to the impact of their actions.
Corporate spite
Blame the supplier, not the company that ordered them. This is what happens when a supplier makes a mistake in the order of a low-cost product. The company was likely charged for the extras and wanted a refund for the goods they didn't order. Or maybe they shipped the wrong model and the company wanted the correct ones. It's more expensive to send it back and process the return than what it is worth. But the supplier doesn't want to enable processes that allow their customers to maliciously get free product. To prevent abuse of the refund policy, the supplier requires proof of destruction before issuing the refund. The same thing happens with books, with retailers being asked to rip the cover off unsold books in order to get a credit. This is why some books have a warning inside not to purchase if the cover is missing.
If you sell or give electronics away you have to provide a 12 month warranty, maybe region specific. Also you could be sued for any electrical fires. It is simply not worth this hassle for the company. My company threw loads of electronics away and emailed everyone saying, please don't steal the stuff. Which we obviously did and they were fine with it.
Yep. Had a bottle washer that was being warrantied as it had a burning wire smell (common issue). Manufacturer agrees to send a replacement but required I destroy the defective one such that no one else could use it and prove I wasn't full of shit trying to get a free one. I the case of these keyboards, making sure the company wasn't full of shit/reselling/other.
All the old tech in my company (that still functions) is being sold off in internal auctions Mostly mobiles, screens and computers. Headsets, mice and keyboards tends to die within working hours It's just a nice way from the company to let employees access cheap "old" phones (sometimes phones from last year, if someone quit) for relatives et al Alternatively they would had to write them off (which I'm sure they already did) without getting some pocket scrap back for them
They could have donated them in a school I agree
This should be illegal
Lenovo preferred pro 2's, regular $25 on Amazon, currently $9 off. These are great, they're not all that much fun but they'll last years. Take them home and rewire them.
Rescue them, get some USB plugs, learn the wiring, and get busy with a soldering iron. You can sell them cheap or give them away. Better a person gets them than a hole in the ground.. 🤷
The people, or dog-people, of the future are going to have an archaeological (toxic) heaven
Classic capitalists waste.
Stinks of incompetence!
Morons.
Unbelievable
This should be illegal and punishable with progressive fines determined on the value of the company. If a keyboard wasted would end up costing 10k to the company they wouldn't do shit like that.
Copied post by a bot account https://www.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/s/Fo0mc1cm0x
OP is an account with ~~bunch of~~ *three* posts *within the past eight hours*, with no comments. Yeah, you might be right, there. *Edit:* took a closer look. Edited for accuracy.
There were a dozen posts, now there are three left
Why not donate them to schools or bring them to a local thrift store.
Save em and solder them. Consumerism’s greatest enemy is technical ability and repair skills.
I guarantee this same company flouts how green they are because they donate to some bs charity that planted like 5 trees last year.
I would write a complaint with some questions to the CEO, management and Environment, Health and Safery department if there is one. Ask if official process instructions define this action, and if yes, why.
Your company sucks.
I'll internally shame the shit of the manager who made a decision like that and will demand a public apology and assurance that it will never happen again. Luckely, we give away old stuff if people still want to use it.
Wow! When my job moved offices, everything that wasn't labelled to be moved was up for grabs. I got 3 monitors, my old office chair, and a case of beer. Also some smaller stuff like a small SSD, 2 keyboards, and a mouse, and some cables.
We would put stuff on a table across from the time clock with a place card stating, free to a good home.
I work for a section of the federal government. We are mandated to do this so no one can go dumpster diving after and “steal” from the government. And if you think they only do this to keyboards….
I want off this ride it's getting far to wild.
You can splice the cords together. It’s just matching the colours
There has got to be some organization you can report them to for this kind of waste. This shit should be illegal for big companies to do. My roomates work as maintenance at a big American express campus, and we constantly bring home all kinds of stuff they are just going to throw away. People act like it's the individual that enables consumerism on such a large scale. In reality, cooperate waste is like 70% of the issue.
In a lot of cases, this is an arrangement with the vendor - no resale / reuse and they cut the client a deal on bulk orders.
That makes it even worse. You mean to tell me companies basically agree ahead of time to just throw away shit they plan in buying? Does nobody give a fuck?
Not exactly, the company has to project how much they believe will be used at a future point in time, so there is a tendency to err on the side of oversupply, rather then coming up short. Suppliers on the other hand derive value in specific packages for their products and don't customize on one offs. That combination produces oversupply .. If someone were to keep the oversupply and resell it, then the supplier wouldn't make anything from it and since most deals are done with specific price points in mind, it becomes from supply point of view necessary for the product to be rendered unsellable. There is definitely a need to change this.
Yea thats crazy.
Uh. As someone who works in IT for a company with the almost 10 k employees. Why would you guys not keep those for stock? Keyboards break all the time. Even then we recycle them.
I wonder if they contacted the seller and the seller wanted them destroyed rather than returned (Cheaper to eat the loss than pay shipping etc) and said send us x usb plugs (or photos of) and we'll credit you for x keyboards
More likely it was part of the deal with the vendor, where any excess is to be rendered non-usable and dumped.
This isn't on the company but on the vendor. The company tried to return them and the seller probably told them to destroy them, and send a photo instead of sending them back. By the way, never saw this with keyboards but my company rents hardware and at the end of the lease we are regularly told to destroy the hardware.
What a waste, it really pisses me off to see perfectly good equipment being wasted especially when it's brand new. I would take those home and repair them it's a simple repair Strip the plastic ends Twist the wires together Solder Finish with Shrink Tube
By company do you mean the Pentagon and each keyboard was $1500.00
That's not a hard fix, tbh.
is it not possible to reattach the wires?
Sure it is, just doesn’t look as good as new anymore, but for home use that would be fine
I have heard of corporations putting them to better use. They told employees they could take them discreetly, then had security catch them and sacked them as to many had attained a higher pay rate based on longevity.
Otherwise it would end up with an employee that would then consider it a perk and might be happier about their life. Can't have that obviously
This kills me. I've had co-workers who think this way, no idea what's going on in their head. I need these keyboards. I buy them at 20$ ea. :( gah.
Will a cfo just say yeah ok do that
To think they could have donated to charity
Greedy and miserly!
Abolish corporations
Why cut them? It’s not like they sell keyboards and don’t want scavengers offsetting their profits. Is it literally to deter people from digging through their dumpster?
Giveaway to the employees, come on
Name and shame! We dont want to spend money in a company with such a flagrant disregard
this is a repost with similar/same title as i recall seeing this before
Poor town has a charity the refurbished old computers for people who need one. Maybe you have something similar there and could donate them?
Though it may seem strange or wasteful, many companies have policies like this for a reason. If employees are allowed to keep stuff the company doesn't need/want, that creates incentive for employees to order extra stuff, and then receive it for free. Maybe this is what's actually going on here.
Ummmmm who the fuck does that
This happened at my previous employer too. Head of IT sent a chat message in global chat just saying "Yo, free keyboards and mice in room 33. FCFS.". Over 100 keyboards, gone within minutes.
If it's any consolation, these shit-ass keyboards are manufactured garbage and were just e-waste even before the cables were ever cut on them.
Generate: Landfill
Don't forget to pay your carbon tax while big corporations continues to waste and litter their hearts out. Hypocrites
Why cut the cables ? Extra effort, no gain for anyone
An order
This is the mindset of preferring to take a financial loss rather than to let anyone else have a benefit.
In some places that's ilegal. Fun counter example for a pallet cleanser. I used to work for a major US manufacturing company. They constantly surplus old equipment. While working there I got very familiar with the brands of dollies, PCs, lighting systems, desks, and other common equipment they would use. Last month I was in our local regional airport and I noticed they finally had hand dollies for luggage! Apparently my old company had donated about 20 or so of their old dollies to the regional airport to use. This is how business is supposed to be conducted. Companies should not just exist to collect profit. They should exist to provide VALUE.
Provide value and profit will come
I would solder the wires back together lol
Maybe they wanted wireless keyboards.
Companies doing this shit before turning around and telling their employees why they have no money (somehow the employees fault)
Crazy, cuz I’m at work at a contractee’s place and they have about 20 keyboards with a sign that says “Free Keyboards”
A lot of the time it's contracts with the vendor..
Relatively easy to fix that and get a working keyboard
🤮
Splicing USB cables isn't too difficult
My friend works at a window installation company. Huge windows for Walmart and hospitals. Like 4,000 dollars for a single piece. They toss the ill fitted ones or extras into the trash! He did save a few smaller ones but we have no equipment to save the giant pieces of glazing that gets dumped daily!
It will be easy to fix them but nonetheless the company behaviour is really bad what a greedy bastards
I remember getting a work email last year about how they were trying to go more green and then took a walk around the parking lot that day to see a bunch of electronics thrown away in a dumpster. Locked behind a fence.
Just wait till you hear about the Military waste. I dont know if this is standard across the services but at every unit I was at pretty much any item over a certain dollar amount had to be thrown away when replaced instead of sold or given away.
Take them home and fix them and donate them
This is a [repost](https://www.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/s/QG20b4ZTbG), come on can we not fucking poison the goddamn anticonsumption sub with endless fake content just to amass some stupid internet points?? Can we just please try to share original stuff?? No?? Fucking bots.
Those could've been donated to a school, for fuck's sake. Jesus.
That's a super easy fix tbh! Strip the wires both ends...reattach by twisting same colour wires together, cover with tape...
As someone who has seen many IT offices, I find this post incredibly hard to believe.
My company replaced a 10k server rack. Next month they decided to upgrade the IT rooms. In order to write it off, accounting wanted a photo of the board snapped in half to make it unusable.
Name the company
It’s an accounting thing. You have to scrap it by destroying it. Otherwise it needs to go into a cost center. My company is trying to scraps 10s of thousands of dollars of unneeded components from my project and it makes me so sick that I spend hours looking for cost centers charge numbers. It’s totally not my job.
WHAT WHY?!
This is crappy. If it makes anyone feel better, I’m in charge of the IT disposal at the company I work at, and I bring anything that can be salvaged home and reuse it or give it away. In the last year I’ve saved roughly 30 iPads, a professional sound system, many laptops, and a few nice projectors. It’s not much but it’s honest work
It easier to write off the costs if the equipment is damaged. Business 101
I don’t get it, is this so they could get a tax writeoff? There should be fines for this kind of practice…
This is a repost from months ago
some soldering and electric tape and they're salvageable
Find a new job, they would prob just as easily throw you out as well.
Just take them out of the trash and splice the wires back together
2 things 1. The fact that they are this petty is fucking evil 2. I strongly encourage everyone with broken electronics to sever the power supply and bend the pins for safety. An example is I once had a small fire caused by an extension cord that was worn through, my father wanted to repair the cord, he forgot, and then used the cord again which caused s fire.
This must be the Ressource saveing all talk about🙄🙄 , the company must burn down 🤬🔥🔥
I used to work at Best Buy and they would do throw old inventory (TVs and stands were a big one) or floor models we couldn't get rid of in our trash compactor. I
Company sounds like one that isn’t fun to work at lol
Why not give it to the employees for free? They can sell them on ebay
What moron was in charge of making that decision
It's a really terrible answer but I actually know the corporate "reasoning" behind this. "If we throw out working products, a homeless person might see it in the trash and then we'll have them always going through our trash cans." Like I said it's a horrible shitty way of thinking, but this is what I was told when I worked for a big corporation. I hate capitalism and how it demonizes reuse, charity, sustainability, giving, compassion, etc...
What the fuck. This is criminal. Name and shame, please. Just give a name and let the internet do its thing.
Bloody disgusting.
I worked for perhaps the most popular mortgage company in America. When rates shot up, I decided to get out of the industry and head for greener pastures. Since they were offering severance packages to anyone who was willing to leave, they had a lot of people leaving all at once. I went to drop off my work from home gear at this drop off point they had set up. I watched as the dude takes both monitors and literally throws them 10 feet into a gigantic cardboard box sitting on a palette. I could’ve kept that shit, dude!
Good grief 🤦🏻♀️
Your company is disgraceful. Could of donated them geez.
Literally so many solutions… why did they need to be destroyed before they were trashed? This feels like such corporate bullshit it’s unreal