Batman and the Magic Dumpsters

One nice thing about having our group's test exposure hut in the backwater part of campus (near the fields of parking lots and the credit union) is that we are over where they park the dumpsters when they're offloading lots of garbage and scrap. Therefore, my walk to the hut often includes a peek into the various rolloff containers. You can probably see where this is going--I have long been a fan of dumpster diving (a.k.a. Grueszing)--don't knock it; I've rescued a table saw from a garbage pile.

Lately, I've been noticing some odd coincidences about what shows up in the dumpster. For instance, the test hut really needed some more chairs (we were dragging around durisol blocks as seating.) A few weeks later, a dumpster filled with metal stacking chairs showed up. A few weeks after that, a fleet of rolling office chairs showed up next to another dumpster.

I've become a big fan of putting our bulky equipment on casters, so that we have a bit more flexibility when we need to work in one part of the hut or another. I looked in the dumpster one day, and it was filled with five sets of rusty but serviceable 4" casters. So I had to climb into the box to retrieve them.

I started thinking about building a bicycle trailer, to further reduce my car use (typical uses would be getting Home Depot runs or moving my toolboxes to the test hut). The very next day, the grounds crew dumps off their load of unclaimed bicycles, and I managed to salvage a pair of wheels.

Finally, I was thinking that we needed some storage lockers at the test hut. I was putting together a plan to buy some materials, when I noticed that there was a set of perfectly sized lockboxes in the magic dumpster. Wow. Retrieved them, put casters on them, and they're good to go.

Man. I think I'm going to wish for a pony next.

BTW--Bird--they seem to drop off rack mount cabinets once in a while. Need a new rack mount?

Jen--how much is it worth to you for me not to retrieve a rack mount for Bill? [grin]