[Milsurplus] Surplus windfall

[Hue Miller]

Working for a latter-day ILEC telco, I have seen a couple offices with olde 
electromechanical
switches being junked. These days the mercury relays and such highly deadly 
(?) materials
go with everything else in ship containers to pleasant industrial villages 
in China. After
a few experiences of seeing older test equipment, power supplies, and such 
get loaded
willynilly into Gaylord containers ( I like to call them "Gay Lords" ) by 
people whose vision
sees them in terms of cubic feet of whatever metal, I now feel regret that I 
didn't abstract
more from the waste stream than I did. AT&T like rules notwithstanding, 
sometimes you
have to apply some judgment that's  better in terms of the 'big picture'.
I once sold a bag of WECo tubes, destined for the dumpster, to an oriental 
gentleman,
for half a kilobuck. I don't think there were any genuine audiophile tubes 
in there, but
the name was right and the gleam was right, and what he did with them was 
his problem.
I was there at the right place and right time. I think the overall happiness 
of our planet
was increased slightly by my rerouting of the tubes, altho strictly 
'illegal", from the
dumpster-landfill route. It helps to balance the universe by contributing a 
cash
equivalent of a fraction of the windfall value to charity.
The experiences with Apex remind me of Ray Kresek trying to persuade the 
Spokane
scrap metal dealer to sell him an 860 or 861 tube for his collection. With 
every visit
to the dealer and repeated offer to buy, the dealer was increasingly 
convinced that
the tube was worth more $$$$ and that Ray was trying to put something over 
on
him, and that somehow the tube innards precious metals were worth much more.
Finally the dealer, on the last visit, in his presence smashed the tube with 
a hammer,
to end the discussion. -Hue