A day of Excess
So this morning, the Meert family embarks on a yearly ritual. Today is a busy day on the UF campus as thousands of students leave for the summer or head out into the real world. As part of the move out process, large dumpsters are set out by the dorms and hundreds of thousands of dollars of furniture, clothing, food, computer equipment and electronics are tossed into the trash. To its credit, UF has instituted a donation center at the dorms as well, but based on what we see, much of it ends up in the trash. So, we go out and dumpster dive for treasure. In previous years we've brought so much home that we were able to raise hundreds of dollars at a garage sale and donate other stuff to local charities. The amount of waste is tremendous. Well off we go.
Cheers
Joe Meert
posted by Unknown @ 7:19 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I wonder if it would be impolite to just go down the corridors and ask "do you want this?". You could tag it and bag it before it hit the curb.
Anyway, good luck on the treasure hunt. I'm not seeing much in my neighborhood. The kids are being frugal.
The real treasures can be found where grad students move out post-degreification, as many somehow manage to afford actual houses to fill with junk, rather than dorm cells. I normally go yard-saling Gainesville every other weekend looking for antiques, and cant begin to count how many perfectly good computers, televisions, fishtanks, pinball machines, and tiki idols I see collecting dew in early morning yards.
You can blame the high cost of textbooks for forcing one of your undergrads to secretly deal antiques on the mean streets of G'ville, instead of studying.
Yes, I did this all the time going to school. We did well today, should do even better tomorrow. At the athletes dorm we found a whole box of never worn t-shirts. Pretty nice. We always get chased away by someone. Last year a rent-a-cop for graduation told me I could not dig through the dumpster and I asked which statute says that. She sad 'your kids will be ashamed' and I said 'my kids love this!'. Then I told her I was a professor and needed the extra money. She did not laugh. This year some residence hall workers came out and said that my kids had to come out of the dumpster. They were nicer and said that they were just trying to help because the cops had earlier taken some people away. I took the kids out.
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