During moveout, many enjoy thrill of the Dumpster dive

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BY MICAH MERTES / Lincoln Journal Star

The first stop on our grimy, perilous expedition resulted in a bike tire pump (functional!), a CD tower (intact!), an inflatable mummy (still in the box!) and the DVD of “The Man in the Iron Mask” (double DiCaprio!). 

Yes, our stop at the Dumpsters at UNL’s Courtyards had been most lucrative.

But at Abel Hall ... troubles. Competition. One young woman and two guys quickly loaded fat, rolled-up carpets into the bed of a white Ford F-150.

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Micah Mertes digs through a Dumpster containing discarded college student possessions in UNL's Harper-Schramm-Smith complex Tuesday evening. (Michael Paulsen)

Micah Mertes digs through a Dumpster containing discarded college student possessions in UNL's Harper-Schramm-Smith complex Tuesday evening. (Michael Paulsen)

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The trio, who didn’t want to give their names, said they could get $15 apiece for them.

And they drove off, proud, a little smug, leaving behind just the leftovers of a pleather game chair and a purple Frisbee.

Every year on this particular week, as hordes of University of Nebraska-Lincoln students move out of the residence halls, a lot of cool stuff gets tossed in the trash.

Futons, lamps, carpets, couches, speakers. DVDs, textbooks, desks, bed frames, book shelves. Printers, canned food, perfume, lawn chairs, shoes.

Much of it is in good to perfect condition.

Apparently when you get to the end of the school year, you find you’ve got this stockpile of stuff that’s grown superfluous. It’s too much to take home or give to charity.

So thank goodness for all those gigantic Dumpsters outside the dorms. They’re a quick, easy solution to your too-much-junk woes.

“I’ve thrown out, like, half my stuff,” said Gretchen Anderson, an 18-year-old UNL freshman moving out of Abel Hall. “I’m just too lazy to move it.”

Are most students this way?

“Yeah, I think most probably are,” said her friend Rich Martier, 19.

But soon those same students will be on the other end of the arrangement. They’ll no longer be insouciantly tossing their stuff like there’s no tomorrow. They’ll be taking someone else’s stuff, getting thrift-store quality for the price of free.

Every year, a lot of people dive into these Dumpsters. It’s like garage sale day but with less dignity.

“You look at those Dumpsters at 8 at night, and come back and look at them at 8 in the morning, and you see how much has been taken,” said Glen Schumann, associate director of UNL housing. “And people do find stuff of value sometimes.”

To get in the spirit of the week (and also because journalists don’t make much money), two coworkers and I dived into a series of Dumpsters Tuesday evening, seeing what treasures we could find in these forsaken troves.

But we discovered Dumpster diving wasn’t the pleasantly deplorable act we’d hoped for, but in fact a dive into Machiavellian competition.

The rug-gathering triad in the F-150 kept beating us to every location. They were already at the three Dumpsters of Harper-Schramm-Smith, pulling out all that was valuable before we even had a chance to look. We jumped right into the cans, rummaging as quickly as possible before they ran off with everything.

I found a neat lamp.

At this point, the Dumpster diving was starting to get contentious.

“Why you wearing gloves?” one of our nemeses asked me condescendingly, like I was some kind of yuppie bourgeois because I wasn’t bare-handed. “You afraid you’ll get dirty, man?”

We moved briskly to the next Dumpster, an inconspicuous cache of valuables tucked behind Neihardt Hall.

Here were the finds of the day.

A cute teddy bear, scented oils (the kind you light), perfumes, a corkboard and a whole box of still-packaged food, including chocolate pudding, applesauce, microwave popcorn and a whole lotta ramen noodles (Yes, we took the food, citing the George Costanza justification: “It was on the top!”).

Then the truck carrying the vindictive rug-gatherers crept up to our Dumpster. They were obviously peeved we’d beaten them to this one ... that we’d found the awesome corkboard first.

“Anything good in there?” one asked us, every word dripping with contempt. 

“Oh, you know,” I mused, “there’s probably not much left ... not now.”

They got out of the truck, perused through what we left them. I thought we were going to partake in a “West-Side-Story”-esque musical standoff, snapping our fingers in one another’s faces. But it never came to that.

They went back to their truck, empty-handed, and drove off. We packed the last of our finds in the back of my station wagon, each of us basking in the golden glow of finally one-upping them, whoever they were.

I’d just spent three hours not only digging through other people’s trash but actually fighting for said trash with a formidable opponent, all the while being flung dirty looks by passers-by.

And as I considered eating one of the applesauce packets I’d pulled out of the garbage, an overwhelming sense of pride swept over me.

Reach Micah Mertes at 473-7395 or mmertes@journalstar.com.