Way back in the mid-70s, I spent a not too untypical Friday evening getting drunk at the bar in a Ramada Inn in a small city in Oklahoma. After deciding that I wasn't going to get lucky that night--that was typical--I wandered through one of the hallways of the motel on the way to an exterior door that would get me closer to my car on a rainy night. I noticed a lot of room service dishes on the floor outside of rooms, and I'd just moved into an apartment and needed some more dishes, so I started gathering up all those disgusting plates and scraping the big food chunks back onto the trays. By the time I got to the end of that hallway, I had two armfuls of dirty plates, saucers and silverware. Right now, thirty-five years later, married with two adult children out of the house, we've still got six of those Ramada Inn plates in a cupboard, along with two saucers. My wife gets mad at me when I tell people where those dishes came from. Heck, I always thought it was kind of a funny story.
Oh, yeah, a few years later, I was still unmarried, standing in the kitchen of another apartment in another city, talking on the phone with the girl who would soon become my wife. This was before cell phones and cordless phones, and I had to go to the bathroom real bad. I didn't want to interrupt a long distance phone call, so I took one of those plates out of a cupboard, placed it on the kitchen floor, and took a dump onto it during the phone call. After the phone call, it cleaned up fine.