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The things people are forced to throw away!
Our department is having a big cleanout. Everything must go,
unless you store it in your own space. All storage space is
being emptied.
The good new is that the things like tubes and the tube tester are being saved for now.
But vast numbers of perfectly good old vacuum pumps, perfectly good
old Tektronix oscilloscopes, 100 Variacs, beautiful old monochromators,
a few tons of stainless steel boxes, several 130 volt 10,000 amp DC power
supplies, etc. etc. are being thrown out.
Due to state law, they can't be sold for profit, only given to
other University departments or State agencies (and this is
essentially a logistic impossibility) or MUST be destroyed and sold
as scrap. We don't get any of the scrap money! They can however,
be ransacked for parts, and we sure do do that! I saved a few
very high end Viewsonic monitors and a couple of extra CRTs from them.
True antiques are an exception but somewhat a pain. A CTC-100,
for example, could be auctioned off ... but we would not get the proceeds.
But we have nothing like that, well the very high end tube testers, but those are safe.
We already have too many old scopes that aren't worth ... yet ...
enough to put on auction. Most go. All the antique lasers are going.
My 1971 vintage and now historic and antique scientific apparatus has
most of its bulk going ... no storage space ... but I saved the guts.
We're talking up to a million dollars of stuff that could be sold on eBay
for a good money, including expenses of bookkeeping, that by law can't
be sold that way, but by law must be scrapped. That money would fund
a couple of grad student fellowships forever, but we can't get it.
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