There are plenty of stories in the news about crack heads taking manhole covers and ripping out copper pipes from homes in the middle of the night. You also see nice "clean" pictures of workers at large corperate recycling centers doing their business to clean up the environment and lessen the need for strip mining. Compulsive hoarding is also kind of big on TV lately (TV shows about it) so some people might think you have a screw loose. There isn't too much in the news about anything in between, so people lump you into one extreme or the other.
A few weeks back somebody helped themselves to the aluminum cans in the plastic recycler bin we put out front for pickup (since my mom has a dozen cats who eat food in aluminum cans and the household here is into pop we have quite a bit to put out every other week) and my mom *****ed about it. Personally I don't care since it will get recycled anyway and they didn't make a mess with what was left. There are trucks driving by every Thursday here (trash day) and I try to keep anything they might find usable to the right of the nomal garbage so that they can take it (TV's, computer parts, old aluminum screen door, gas grill, etc) and it is gone within an hour.
People look at me funny when I snag a 20 years old computers from somebody or ones left on a curb as trash, so I know what you guys must be hearing and seeing. The thing is I don't realy care what strangers think about my hobby, especially when quite a bit of their junk is actually valuable to other collectors. Hell even the people who pay for computer scrap at local small time recyclers think my hobby is odd, doesn't bother me digging in their tubs for looking hidden treasures. As long as what you are doing is legal and profitable why would you care about what somebody else thinks?
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