I'm out putting a coat of paint on the stompbox power supply I'm building, but am a couple of parts short on still, and my neighbor asks me if I have any use for some 9V batteries, because he got a new, sealed
case of Duracells at work where they were ordered but unclaimed. I say sure, and he lays a fresh box of 72 on me. I prefer carbons, but for free? I'll live with it.
He's from Niger (not Nigeria), the second-poorest country on earth, and is astounded at the waste in the materials-acquisition department where he works for a major hospitals group. Millions of bucks worth of stuff is ordered and never used or claimed and winds up going home with employees or being destroyed. He says they gave SIX CARGO CONTAINERS full of unclaimed medical and office supplies to a group of medical missionaries recently.
Then, just to make things really weird, he finds two full cases of blacklight bulbs (!)
in his attic.
