Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - XMas in July

My hubby Ironwolf works for a company that does consumer product testing. When the  testing is done, there are lots and lots and lots of these sample products left. Many of them are destroyed in the testing process, but some of them are not. The test samples are stored for a period of some months and are then destroyed or given away to the employees. This latter practice is highly uncommon in the industry, and I suspect that there are some ethical ramifications, but otherwise all of these perfectly good items would be thrown away, so I must support the program. (A fair percentage is also donated to charity or raffled off internally and the proceeds given to charity).
 
Today was one of those days where the warehouse is cleared out and the employees get their pick of items. More importantly, Ironwolf was on the list of those who get first dibs this time around. So he comes home with a carload of assorted items. It's like Christmas. There's toys, books, some really funky expensive cookware, tons and tons of office supplies, some decent glassware... the list goes on and on. Of course, he also brings home total crap and even things that we can't identify. But it's pretty neat. We keep some of it, give some away as gifts, and donate anything left over. My kitchen's full of boxes now, and I'm pretty overwhelmed.
 
I will admit to being a little disappointed by one thing though - there were two large jewelry boxes from Tiffany's in the pile. I opened them up to find, well, nothing but two very nice jewelry boxes. Ah, well, I can keep some of my own jewelry in there and pretend...