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I thought I'd seen it all....

Tuesday night is trash night, also known as garbage pickers night. I became familiar with garbage picking in college, when people were seriously obsessed with driving around to the various college houses and apartments to collect "trash," to,...I guess try to make money off of? I'm not really sure what they did with it to be honest.

I thought I'd seen it all until the day Pat and his roommates put their brown couch, that had survived an entire year in a house full of 8 boys, out on the curb. I was absolutely positive no one in their right mind would touch that couch. It didn't look good and it certainly didn't smell good. Did I mention that the couch started off white? If you scratched it, you could see where it used to be white. Gross that I even know that. What's quite possibly even more disturbing is that I actually used to sit on that couch and watch football games and movies. Gross.

Anyway, that couch was gone within ten minutes. I was shocked. I feel bad for the poor soul who bought that couch reupholstered in some used furniture store, completely unaware of the nastiness that was under the new fabric. At that moment, I realized that garbage pickers will take anything and everything and didn't think I'd ever be surprised again. Until last week...

Last Tuesday, it was once again garbage night, and we decided it was time to take our Christmas tree down. The needles were falling down like crazy and, well, Christmas was over! So, we took the ornaments down and Pat took the tree out to the curb. Some of our neighbors had already beat us to it and their trees had been on the curb for a few days. Within twenty minutes of putting our tree out to the curb...it was gone. Someone garbage picked our dying Christmas tree! And whoever it was, left the neighbor's trees out on the curb.

I came to the conclusion that someone took our tree to get the wood to burn for heat or something. And that made perfect sense to me. My theory eased my mind and allowed me to move on from the weirdness of someone taking our tree. But then today, when I was telling the story to someone at work, they informed me that you can't burn pine so whoever took the tree, didn't take it to burn the wood. So what in the heck did they do with it then?

What is the strangest thing you've seen garbage picked (or better yet, garbage picked yourself!). I believe my mom garbage picked building blocks for us that we used growing up. They were made of real wood and brought us years of entertainment! I garbage picked a fun toy for Max to play in and some end tables.

Comments

-Kelsey Coghill said…
Growing up we had a pond & my dad would throw our old Christmas tree in & the fish would make homes in it or something... the national forest collects trees for that too... but I don't know what else it could be used for!
Maybe someone is just playing a joke on you :)
As for taking things from the curb my mom did that once when I was younger and I was MORTIFIED, but now that I'm older I've done it lots of times! People throw away good stuff!!
My favorite was this summer I was living in a town that had a great recycling program and on trash days I'd walk down the block and pick up a few magazines from someone's & read them & recycle them the next week!
Ericabee said…
Although I haven't seen people garbage pick specific items, people do crawl around in the dumpster at my apartment complex and my dad puts just about any broken thing he wants to get rid of on the curb knowing someone will pick it up thinking they can fix it. Did you know that there are people who's diet consists entirely of thrown out food? Most of them aren't homeless or poor either. They're called freegans. Weird stuff.
Kristen said…
Ohhh Emily, this made me laugh out loud LOL!! That is just tooo freaking hysterical! :o)

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