So yesterday Shawn and I start to plow through a collection of a couple hundred prerecorded tapes. Most are classical, with a few odds and ends thrown in. As we get into it we find that about half of them are damaged, lots of scalloped edges that won't track, etc. One is an acetate tape that have lost several minutes of music and is full of splices that are sticking together. It's a military band thing, that I found quite bright and harsh. We needed an extra take up reel and figured no one would care if this goofy brittle marching band thing was sacrificed, so I spent ten minutes spooling the tape off the reel into a trash can.
At around 2 p.m. one of our customers who is a big tape collector came by. He spied the box in the trash - "ooooh, that is a really cool album!"