Had a good day at the yard Friday

As you all may know,I work as a burner for a fairly big yard in Ontario. I take my lunch in and old U Haul truck beside my bulk oxygen tank since the lunchroom is filled with the other employees who all are proud of the fact that they never finished high school and its like listening to a bunch of 9th graders. Since my workstation is across from the baling pile,I take a stroll over to see what one of the peddlers is unloading. He is about to toss two new in the box Singer knitting machines into the pile when I got there. I ask him if he has any idea what those are worth online and that he would surely get more money by selling them seperately. He replies that he cant read or write and they are scrap to him. Now I could see this if he had a learning disability or brain damage,but as the conversation went on,I learned that he is a newcomer to this country 30 years ago and didnt have much use for the english langauge (is "newcomer" a politictly correct term ?) I couldnt imagine surviving even one day without being able to read and write.

Saturday morning comes and I ask my supervisor if I can have the two knitting machines I have stashed in my U Haul and he gives them to me.



Saturday afternoon I list them on Kijiji for 200$ each and both sold on the first call. I listed them for well below value just for a quick sale.
I have more stories like this from my life in scrap yards if you are all interested ,but this one is the most recent.

Great score! More stories like this are what makes this business interesting. Well, and the cash doesn't hurt either.

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Heres another one for you:

About ten years ago I worked for another yard that dealt only with peddlers and no commercial accounts. I dont know this for sure,but there must not be a word in italian for scrap metal so they refer to it as "garbage " in english.
The first car come in.........two elderly italians driving a 72 nova four door that looked factory new with the trunk filled with clean flattened tin cans for scrap. Well the word spread like wildfire in the italian community that us dumb canuck folks would buy their "garbage". We had a huge pile of dealer bale that im sure the owner made big bucks from. That was a good yard to get good resale stuff from and I enjoyed working there. But all good things come to and end when I got the call to go back doing ship repairs for three times the money I made there,so I said my goodbyes and left on good terms I will never forget that one