| I remember a few years ago when we had builders' skips on the drive
| for some time; it was a real education. One night the skip would be
| filled up with crap dumped by somebody; the next night somebody else
| would have been sniffing round, nicked the crap, and then by morning
| it would have been replaced with something different. Etc etc. My
| personal, free, bring-and-buy sale...

When I worked in a Uni Physics dept, they were doing some long term
refurbs involving a couple of skips being (theoretically) emptied every
few days. We received a memo from the HoD that ran something like,

"Please stop taking stuff out of the skips. The contractors will only
remove them when they're full, and they keep turning up having been told
they're full only to find someone's emptied them again."

It did seem a shame, though, to send off all this gorgeous
brass/wood/glass lab equipment to be crushed. I managed to acquire a
beautiful and only slightly cracked (and therefore useless, but
decorative) 19thC discharge tube.

R.