Scavenging for the perfect summer

The month of May brings the academic year to a close as the Penn community collectively celebrates the end of final exams, Commencement activities for seniors, and the beginning of summer break with warmer, lazier days just beyond the horizon. May also brings with it an often-overlooked Penn tradition -- scavenging.

Final exams, post-finals parties, limited suitcase space, and non-refundable airplane tickets result in students inevitably leaving various items behind. For many years, Penn students have disposed of a wide variety of bulky items including furniture, electronics, and other useless crap in and around their dormitories during underclassmen and senior move-out.

This year, I became curious about the phenomenon. What kinds of unusual things did people leave behind? Was any of it useful or in resalable condition? What kind of people was cheap enough to search through another person's trash? More importantly, I needed a couch.

In anticipation of an increasingly more abundant amount of down time, I felt it was necessary to acquire a futon. So, in search of a perfect aid in relaxation, I scanned the past few weeks of submissions to the online newsgroup "upenn.for.sale."

I found several couches, beds, mattresses, and futons owned by seniors eager to part with their used furniture. Their prices were too high, but most of them wouldn't be graduating for another week, so I might be able to haggle them down. In the meantime, I looked for an alternative.

Some friends convinced me to accompany them while they went scavenging through the various living spaces around campus. Last year, my friends found a lot of cool items, including a working computer monitor, a coat rack, hundreds of yaffa blocks, a computer chair, and a couch. They dragged the couch to Upper Quad, but chose to finish searching the Quad before returning to carry their couch to their off campus apartment. This proved to be a fatal mistake. When they returned to Upper Quad ten minutes later, they found their second-hand couch missing, taken by rival graduate student scavengers. My friend still curses that day, that is, until he found an even dumpier couch on 46th and Osage.

If you're going to sweep the Quad, you should budget about an hour and a half, while the High Rises can take two or three. The quality of the free merchandise is proportional to the age of the inhabitants of the dorm or apartment. The Quad typically has the cheapest, trashiest goods, while the High Rises feature higher quality goods. Be sure to search door to door.

Hamilton Court is a gold mine, although leases do not usually end until August, so it is best to visit before the tenants move in.

In order to best get your scavenge on, rent a big blue cart, as we did, and avoid RA rooms and doors with yellow signs indicating an extended occupancy.

According to Housing and Conference Services move-out policy, once a student vacates a room for the summer facilities staff can dispose of any of the remaining items when the room is cleaned. That means that you better get there first.

Always remember that the law is on your side, and if you happen to get caught by a prickly RA or House Dean, just say that you're picking up the microwave/bicycle/SONY Rio player for an out-of-town friend.

This time out, we found a toaster, a fully functioning television, lots of canned foods, a framed poster of the cast of M*A*S*H (I kept that one), several Hey Day hats and canes, a fish tank, and an unclean set of Tupperware and metal silverware. Sadly, we found no couch. We kept a few things but looked to part with the rest, choosing to eventually donate much of it to a West Philadelphia charity organization, Empty the Shelters.

I returned to "upenn.for.sale" later that week and looked to haggle with the remaining sellers of couches and futons. Unfortunately, few items appealed to me. And when I finally did contact a seller about his futon, he told me he already sold it.

I still haven't found a couch and I will have to enjoy the lazy summer days on the recliner in my sublet's common room, which I am told was found inside a certain humanities department's faculty lounge ten years ago.

Now that's what I'd call scavenging.

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