LISA LING: Even though he’s done this now for several years, [John] Plocher says he’s still surprised by the personal things people leave behind.
People always say that the first thing they take if there was some kind of a disaster is photographs, but…
JOHN PLOCHER: No, we find pink slips to automobiles. We find birth certificates. Now, those types of things we keep and we attempt to mail those…
LISA LING: Computers, computer printers.
JOHN PLOCHER: Yes, there’s a computer. It’s all intact.
LISA LING: Two computers in here.
JOHN PLOCHER: Yes, two computers in there, a table.
LISA LING: Incredible. Incredible.
JOHN PLOCHER: We’ve found dozens of things, but one of the things we found just recently was an urn that somebody’s remains they had been cremated in, and they left their urn at the house. And we called the bank and said, “What do we do with that?” And they said, “Do not trash that.”
Read it all or better yet watch the whole video report.
Going back to the questionable Batchelor Degree thread, a friend of mine rents out apartments to state college students in a small community and annually has great finds. A lot of the good stuff ends up in bags by the curb just because it’s not worth his time to sort OK from junk – he just keeps the real good.
On that note, a friend and her husband spends a few weeks at the end of the College year going to dumpsters around student apartments and dorms, and then sells what they find at a yard sale, the proceeds going to the local Domestic Abuse shelter.
In fact there was an article recently in the New York Times about the joys of dumpster diving. Apparently the end of the academic year brings the cognoscenti to scavenge around the dorms of New York University whose well-heeled students were said to dump all sorts of goodies, including even working iPods.
Lisa Ling is not only beautiful and smart, but she’s courageous as well. On her National Geographic programs, she has gone into some very dangerous parts of the world to report on some touchy topics, such as the Colombian drug war and the vicious MS-13 crime gang.