Trading with Stuff that ain't Yours

When the last company I worked for shut down all equipment and things had to go. All the big stuff was obviously sold on for big money or taken by the parent company but there was still plenty of stuff which simply ‘had to go’. If you had access to stuff you could trade with other people who had access to stuff. In the Army I had access to stationery. It might sound ‘lite’ but I literally could order anything that could make its way under the radar from the HMSO catalogue, like fancy pens and pencils, letraset, fancy papers & geometry sets, and all this stuff made it possible to trade with other departments, like the Quartermaster etc. In the last company we had to get rid of all the computers and computery stuff, and people love computers and I had access to computers. The Lab and Engineering had interesting stuff and these were our main trading partners. I came away with some cordless tools, an acid tester, a micrometer and a microscope.

I still use the microscope today, it’s fascinating and we’ve been incorporating it into some off-curriculum home learning sessions.