When I worked at a Tektronix spinoff company, one time they were clearing out a lot of bench equipment, using a blind auction instead of the Dumpster. Among my

When I worked at a Tektronix spinoff company, one time they were clearing out a lot of bench equipment, using a blind auction instead of the Dumpster. Among my haul, I got two large logic analyzers, for $5 apiece, free of Dumpster commingling artifacts. (This is both a happy memory, and an embarrassing one. After I moved the loot to my cubicle, before figuring out how to get it home without from the rural-ish science park without a car, one of the hardware engineers came by my cubicle, and was admiring the logic analyzers. Being a dumb teenager, with little understanding of adult interactions, I didn't realize until years/decades later that he might've wanted one of the logic analyzers, and I should've offered.) Years later, I was a grad student, and, amidst a pile of junk in a common area of the lab that was being cleared out, was a NeXT Cube, which someone said I could take home. So I had it in my office (again, no car), and then another grad student comes by, and says they'd already claimed it somehow, so I gave it to them. Generalizing from two anecdotes: keeping things out of the Dumpster is good, methods are unfair, and, if you score discarded gear from your workplace, then exfiltrate it immediately, to avoid awkwardness.