Hunters And Gatherers

"Some men are born hunters, and some gatherers. This has been inherited from our primitive ancestors who gathered fruits and nuts for survival, or hunted animals to survive."
Albert Figurado was a born tinkerer and a collector of riff-raff. He was a vehicle mechanic and he saw value in everything he stumbled across - a nut-bolt on the road, washers of varying sizes, discarded screw drivers, ink pens without caps or caps without the pen, refill points, electric wires of varying lengths, a broken kaleidoscope, an ancient mariner's compass of no real utility, discarded magnetic compasses, disintegrating rubber tubes, broken plugs, unusable hardware, an old bust Polaroid camera, an ancient radio, a ballot box he had once bought at an auction.
Each of these he collected and stored them in neat little boxes in his garage. He would find use for each of these objects, which to any other person would have been worthless, and constructed odd looking pens ,with parts from three or four discarded pens; created objects of utility from discarded objects which other wise would have found its way to the town dump or lay rusting on the road. If anything in his house needed repair, he never went out shopping to buy the needed stuff, he made use of his collection to fabricate contraptions that served his purpose. He took pride in this activity and anything and everything he came across was recycled to create hybrid odd but usable instruments.
As he grew old, and his five children were scattered across the world in five different continents, his passion evolved to a finer variation. He no longer collected discarded parts, in fact he disposed all of them with the garbage one fine day. He was now interested in a new passion. He asked his sons abroad to send him stuff that he could use to make his life easier.
But the point was he never in fact used any of these. So he became the owner of a dozen Maglite torches of varying models - some that ran on batteries, others on rechargeable batteries, some with LEDs, others with bright fluorescent bulbs. He asked for cameras, and each of his sons sent across cameras of different variations, for what they thought was their duty as obedient sons. Albert was the owner of a microwave, an induction stove, a flat TV.
But one fine day when there was a massive power surge and each of them went kaput, he still kept them. They were beyond repair but he collected them, the born collector he was. His sons as usual came to his rescue, and bought a replacement for each of these. His collection of ceramic pottery was carefully preserved, but never used, hopefully bearing the prospect of some use in the future. He asked his sons for mobiles, and he got five of them, one each from his five sons. But he never used these and they lay charging all day long on the electric sockets.
He became the owner of laptops; but alas he was technology illiterate, so he never used them. He owned three of them at once and each of them disintegrated for want of use. That folks is the story of Albert Figurado, the born collector. His sons waited and waited to see when he would become hunters, like them....