So, a small history lesson here. Statue of limitations should have long passed, so ---fudgesicle--- it. Texas A&M had a very weird, old building creatively called the "Special Services building." When I was a student there 20+ years ago, my interactions with it were an underground laundromat (underground anything is unusual in Texas) and then jiggling an outside door and wandering around the inside at night. Genuinely felt like a scene from Resident Evil or Silent Hill on the inside.
We step forward in time a couple of years, and I was providing IT support back in the "have you turned it off and back on?" days. I was officed in yet another weird, old building, but the central IT guys were in this one. They spent their days eating cheeseburgers, smoking cigarettes, and playing Diablo 2 on a state server. In fact, my first trip out there for "training," I got handed a stack of burned Diablo 2 discs, given login details to their dialup internet service, and sworn to secrecy. Predictably, I needed an awful lot of "training," usually the day after a new South Park episode had been ripped and put on the internet. So I'd hop in the state owned station wagon and pay them a visit.
Eventually, one of them figures out that he can unlock the door and get out on the veranda. An aluminum picnic table from outside one of the dorms miraculously appeared up there. Then a grill. Then eventually a pop up gazebo for shade. Then one of us gets a Mexican girlfriend who makes tortillas, and the business school (where C students like me went) was next to the campus meat store and I would grab packages of sausage. There is little in life better than grilled subsidized sausage, fresh flour tortillas, mustard, and a cheap cigarette on the clock. It was actually ---fracking--- ridiculous we got away with all this. The perspective from this old photo was taken is where eventually a girls dorm was built, so lots of time was spent hoping someone forgot to close their blinds.
So what does this have to do with this thread, you ask? Well, all good things come to an end. They knew the building was rickety and would periodically inspect cracks in the walls. One guy's girlfriend, who also worked in the building, said, "hey if you think those are bad, come look at THIS one!" It had spread over an inch in less than a month. The building was condemned and we were given 48 hours to clear the contents.
Since it was a "famous" building, former student hospital, blah blah, it got some media coverage. The university sent out one of their slick PR guys, who took one look at us smoking on our party porch and said, get that ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- off there now and if any of you go out there again, you're fired.
The upside of all this is that it's really, really easy to write off state property as "destroyed with building" and all of us were loading our trunks with surplus loot. I had a Weller soldering station I used for many years out of that smash and grab. I finally gave up on repairing it and replaced it with some Yihua station a few years ago.
So, the last remnant of computers, monitors, video cards, components, etc that, er, a friend of a friend who's name I can't remember brought home was a roll of Kester 44 solder.
21 years later.... the roll has been used up....