"
"But then what would you pick?"
Kurt stared at him. "You kidding me? Didn't you *see*? There's a hundred
times more stuff than I could ever pull. Christ, if even one of them had
a squint of ambition, we could *double* the amount we save from the
trash."
"You're an extraordinary person," Alan said. He wasn't sure he meant it
as a compliment. After all, wasn't *he* an extraordinary person, too?
#
Alan was stunned when they found a dozen hard drives that spun up and
revealed themselves to be of generous capacity and moreover stuffed with
confidential looking information when he plugged them into the laptop
that Kurt kept under the passenger seat.
He was floored when they turned up three slightly elderly Toshiba
laptops, each of which booted into a crufty old flavor of Windows, and
only one of which had any obvious material defects: a starred corner in
its LCD.
He was delighted by the dumpsters full of plush toys, by the lightly
used office furniture, by the technical books and the CDs of last year's
software. The smells were largely inoffensive -- Kurt mentioned that the
picking was better in winter when the outdoors was one big fridge, but
Alan could hardly smell anything except the sour smell of an old
dumpster and occasionally a whiff of coffee grounds.
They took a break at the Vietnamese place for coconut ice and glasses of
sweet iced coffee, and Kurt nodded at the cops in the restaurant.
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