If three years in graduate school has taught me anything, I've learned that I'm not above dumpster diving. No siree.

Last night on my way out of lab, I noticed the base of a marble table sitting in the middle of a large dumpster. Since the building here is constantly under renovation for whatever reason, there's a large dumpster sitting right outside the back doors. This is like a walk-in dumpster with a door that swings open. Like, yay. (I'm trying to defend my un-ghettoness.) Anyway, the door was wide open and lo-and-behold, there was the base of a marble table just sitting there.

I'm not sure why it was there or who threw it out, but these tables are pretty freakin' expensive. Like $1300 expensive (before shipping). I continued home, not giving it too much thought.

Well today, I remembered seeing it. Our lab kinda borrowed* a marble table from another lab for our second microscope setup. If I recover this table, this would cancel out our IOU. It wouldn't matter if it was sitting in a dumpster for a day or so, as long as it's still made of marble and 700-ish pounds, it still should be good. So then I spent half an hour this morning rallying up a small group to exhume it from the portable gaping maw of a landfill.

Since it was just a base I saw, we had to find the slab that fits on top or else it's pretty much useless for lab purposes. About 10 minutes of hunting revealed the location of the tabletop to a storage room in the basement. Fun stuff.

So we've put in a work order to have the heavy-ass table moved out of the dumpster/storage room to the fourth floor. Yep, that was today's adventure.

* = read 'stole'