I TEACH TECHNOLOGY AND ALL, but as for my own home equipment, it’s funky old. I have a habit, which I tout as a strategy, of owning something until it is completely worn out. I wait for holes or bad reception before I trade things out. When I buy electronics, I buy the latest models, but then I keep them until they break. When I buy furniture, once it has shaped to fit my body, I won’t let go of it, easily.

Years ago, Bryan, a former student of mine, hardwired my entire house for the Internet, before Wi-Fi was available. I have network jacks in every room and the garage. When Wi-Fi came along, I figured, big deal. I’m fully hard-wired.

I was reluctant to give that old system up. I would bring my totally Wi-Fi-capable laptop to the living room and run a network cord over the couch. I drilled holes through the wall long ago to pass cable from my den to Susan’s den. They have nice covers.

It was Chad, my son-in-law, who inspired me to go Wi-Fi because they came often with the kids and everyone had a freaking tablet. So I had to go wireless.

Hey, I like it. Those old jacks don’t get used much anymore, except for the one connecting my Roku Version 1 box to a Cat 5 cable stapled under the length of my house back to my switch that leads to my router that leads to my DSL modem.

As Chad likes to say, “Dude, you don’t even have an HDMI jack on your televison.” My old $1,600 Sony that I bought at Circuit City was new-age back in the day. It would compress my signal to look like HD. That was pretty cool; it cost me a pretty penny.

It’s all going away. I’m giving up my DSL and switching to cable Wi-Fi. Like I said, I don’t switch until something breaks.

Well, my DSL was so slow that it broke my favorite SimCity leaderboard city. Waaa!

I was in first place globally for Casino City profits on my server, having fun, playing around, staying ahead of some guy from South Korea and another guy who calls his city Mafia Land. I spent months on my city. Hobbyists of all sorts know how time consuming tinkering can be.

One sloggy afternoon, my DSL lines couldn’t handle the data transfer of this busy metropolis and crashed. A speed test showed me running at .11 Mbps. Now my city won’t open. Tech support says “Lines are clear to your house.” That means I pay for a service call. To heck with that. I’m free to leap upward and forward.

We are going to give up our land-line phone number at the same time. We only use it to hang up on cold call advertisers.

With furniture, I’m clingy. Susan and I have gone round and round about this. Once I’ve adapted to a couch or chair, I’m hell-bent to hang onto it, even when the feather stuffing is drifting in the air between me and our 600-lb television. Her strategy behind convincing me to create a man cave in our spare room is now crystal clear. That is where all our old furniture has gone.

As she’s been discarding my favorite couches and chairs, I’ve been taking them downstairs. For a while I had two locations to keep old furniture and seldom sit on it: my garage and my cave.

My original cave was in my garage. Susan then upgraded me to the family room. That allowed me twice the number of old couches and chairs I could hang onto and stack with boxes.

Then Sue’s folks passed and we inherited a whole apartment full of furniture. They had some good stuff, so I just wedged it in. Now my garage extension cave has a new old hide-a-bed couch, love seat, easy chair, floor lamp, desk, and a couple of bar stools. We gave away all the rest. I thought we were set.

Now, Susan wants new furniture in the living room, and I have nowhere to put any more worn out furniture. The mere suggestion of keeping any of it whistles her kettle. She wants to set fire to my favorite chaise lounge.

“And I want the garage clean. I want to park my car in there.” She’s been saying this for 30 years, but I think she means it this time. There’s a padlock sound to her voice I haven’t heard before.

So I’m having this big rollover in habits and housewares just as I’m turning 60.

Have you ever given stuff away on Craigslist? If not, you should try it. It’s fun, fast and easy, and someone else does the heavy lifting. I got claims on six pieces of furniture within two hours of posting.

The garage is now spacious and open. Hey, I like it.

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald for 25 years.