[jimmybob69]

One of the products I sell in my business is lockers. The kind you used in high school. Both street lockers and gym lockers. We sell them, install them, and repair them.

There are some large businesses that manufacture lockers and they have their own salesmen that call on their distributors (like me) and on general contractors in an effort to get their products specified for large projects like schools and government entities, schools and factories being their bread and butter

About 25 years ago, before the internet, the sales rep for Penco Metal Products came to me and asked if I would be willing to install a large locker order he was working on. He believed he would be getting the order and was looking for a company that could assemble the lockers and install them. Our part of the project would be to remove and dispose of the old lockers and assemble and install new lockers. I should note, at the time, most lockers came knocked down in a box and you had to put the panels together to make the locker. It was a freight saving issue.

I paid a visit to the jobsite with him, looked over what had to be done and submitted my price. I will note at this time that all the lockers had integral key locks. Not a padlock that could be cut off, but a real key style lock built into the door. No one had the keys and they had not been opened in years. I couldn't look in the lockers to see if there was anything in them. To remove them we would have to break into them and we were responsible for removing the lockers and their contents.

I submitted my price and we got the job.

Six weeks later the lockers arrived. I had one crew start assembling the new lockers and headed over to the site with another crew to begin removing the old lockers.

The site was an old US Arsenal that had been making cannon barrels for a long time. The old lockers were WW2 era lockers. I had made arrangements with a scrap metal dealer to place a 30 yard container near the locker rooms. We would fill the container with the old lockers and he would remove them and pay me for the steel. He had one condition. The lockers had to be empty. Whatever was in the lockers had to be removed.

As you might imagine, or not maybe, this being an arsenal where cannon barrels were manufactured, a lot of blue collar guys worked there. And boy, did they like their porn. Not every locker, but I recall about every other locker had some type of sexually explicit material in it. We are talking about hundreds of lockers having to be broken open and whatever was in them removed and disposed of.

The first couple of lockers we opened we looked at the stash, passed it around, stacked the magazines neatly in a corner and moved on. It soon became apparent that porn was not going to be a rarity and we started throwing the magazines into the center of the room with the idea of sorting through it at the end of the day. Two hours after we started, we had enough porn magazines to start our own adult book store and we were only halfway through the first room.

At the end of the day we had a pile of smut magazines that was probably 3 feet high and 10 feet in diameter in the center of the room. I was going to have to come up with some way to dispose of it. Or so I thought.

The guys that worked at the Arsenal started at 6 AM. We started at 8 AM. Apparently, a few of the early birds looked in to see what we were doing, saw the pile of smut and grabbed some, told the rest of the early birds what was going on, and by the time we got there the next morning half the pile was gone.

And so it went. We would break the lockers open and throw the smut on the floor in the middle of the room and go home, and sometime during the early morning the smut fairies would come and take the magazines away. I saw so much smut that summer that I lost interest in looking at it.

I don't recall exactly how big the project was, but I seem to recall that we removed over 1,000 lockers, some that were not replaced. The old clothes and boots in the lockers went to Goodwill, the lockers and other metal went to the scrap dealer, and the porn just disappeared.