Spring Clean-Up Week is here, and you know what that means. Yes, Bismarck citizens will set their pride aside and go scavenging in droves! It’s like a city-wide rummage sale without the little masking-tape price tags, and for some reason hundreds of people find it impossible to resist. Running around town sorting through other people’s junk is apparently beneath nobody this week.

Normally I wouldn’t have anything to do with this sort of thing. It may or may not be snobbery to think it’s improper to go through other people’s trash, but it’s not something I’d like to be caught doing. I also have way too much junk of my own already. Besides, unless it’s something really cool like a motorcycle, remote control monster truck or box of Craftsman tools, I’m really not interested in it. That is, until a couple of years ago, when even I couldn’t resist:

Yes, that’s a Pac Man arcade game. The original. Serial number in the low four digits. I had just finished helping our pastor’s family move into a new house and took a residential street I rarely take when I saw this beauty on the boulevard.

Honestly, I passed on it at first. But I used to have a Tron machine in the “Garage Mahal” or “Workshop of Doom™” as my garage is called. When the video board went bad on it we gutted it for parts and made a few hundred dollars on eBay. That made me wonder if I could do the same with this machine, so I researched the going price on Pac Man parts online over dinner and figured what the heck.

I asked the owner of this machine before doing anything. She said the machine didn’t work and that it was being thrown away. I asked her permission to take it, which she gave. I brought it home and plugged it in to diagnose the problem before listing the parts online and…it worked!

We played lots of Pac Man for the next few years, but the video monitor on this machine finally gave up the ghost (pun intended) and I have since parted it out. As per my original plan, I have the boardset all wrapped up in anti-static wrap and am preparing to sell the boardset, the controller, the glass bezels and power supply online. But since my wife and I like to play Pac Man so much, preferably Ms. Pac Man, all proceeds from this sale will go toward the purchase of an arcade Ms. Pac Man machine sometime in the near future.

Let that be a lesson: no matter how hard you resist, you’re likely to stumble upon something during Spring Clean-Up Week that tries to hook you in. It *can* happen to you!