Photo Credit: Becca Sanchez

Madeline Drace (left) and Margaret Ringler (right) affectionately pose with the real-world versions of mac and windows rubbish bins.

Nothing makes a computer desktop cozier than your own virtual trash can. Whether you have a nifty, politically correct “recycling bin” on a PC or a sleek wire basket that disappears and reappears with your dock on a Mac, you’re probably attached to your computer garbage.

Despite their friendly fronts, these digital waste bins are deceiving. When your mouse tosses that ancient lab report in to the “recycle bin,” the last thing you’re doing is recycling. How many of us expect mini virtual men to drive up on their digital garbage truck, cart the contents away to a recycling plant within the computer, and reform the document’s gigabytes into nice fresh memory ready to be consumed again by you? Perhaps a deeply mislead two-year-old or Derek Zoolander. Either Gates feared the smelly connotations of “trash” or enjoyed conning us into believing PC’s are more eco-friendly than they truly are.

We could make our own folder, title it the “Folder of Death,” and it’d fulfill the same purpose.

In step with their “too cool for you” style, Macs avoid the problem of having a spruced up death-folder, opting for a snazzy wire basket benignly named Trash. Because we all know that when you walk into someone’s office and she’s got a [real] wire basket as a trashcan, her middle name is Cool.

As the PC recycle bin sits there screaming lies about its recycling abilities, the Mac wire basket helpfully  “fills up” so we know when it’s time to empty our trash. Unfortunately, the quantity of crumpled paper in the basket doesn’t correspond to the number of files actually in it. If only our “paper waste” would accumulate, spilling onto the floor and across our dock. Finally, when we could no longer hunt out the Safari icon among virtual crumpled paper, we’d be forced to click “Empty” and hear the soothing satisfying swoosh of emptied trash.

Then again, who is to say our old .docs or jpegs should be depicted as clean crumpled paper? What if reject files appeared as banana peels and greasy napkins? Macs would be hard pressed to maintain their sleek composure faced with moldy school lunches. PC’s would have a difficult time “recycling.” Perhaps they would convert to compost. The more files you tried to get rid of, the more compost you would generate. Trees would sprout on your desktop and you could grow a virtual forest.

The challenge is even if we protested, refused to “recycle” or “throw away” anything, we would be the only ones to suffer wading through masses of old, un-deleted files. Our personal computers are personal. Perhaps it’s best to ignore the illogical nature of our rubbish bins. And just be glad they will accept our unwanted documents with open arms, they’re here and they care.