The Dumpster Scooter, or The Night My Dreams Came True

When Eric and I lived in an apartment, we had the most magical thing ever happen to us.  One of the reasons we got married was that we share the same hopes and dreams, one of those dreams being to own a Hoveround scooter.  We came home from dinner one evening and took a different way into the complex.  This was fortunate, because if we had gone the regular path, we wouldn't have seen the scooter someone left by the dumpster.  We both whispered, "Hoveround..." and practically abandoned the car to go see if our eyes were deceiving us. The scooter was actually not a genuine Hoveround, but rather a Zip'r Roo, which was a little disappointing.  E and I looked around to see if it was a joke, and then carried the scooter all the way across the parking lot and up the stairs to our 3rd floor apartment.

We circled the scooter in quiet awe, trying to decide what to wear when we tested it out.  We settled on knee socks, shorts, and (car) racing helmets.  Unfortunately, the battery was drained, but we found that we could buy an extra charger to get it all juiced up.  Before buying the charger, Eric made the stupid decision to call the leasing office to ask if anyone had reported the scooter missing, since we couldn't believe someone would actually throw it away when there were so many scooter adventures to be had.

It turns out that one of our handicapped neighbors had been tooling around in the scooter and had run out of power...right in front of the dumpster.  It's assumed in an apartment that anything left by the dumpster is fair game, if you're creepy enough to take things from the dumpster.  Which we are.  We worked through the ethical dilemma of "finders keepers" vs. "that guy is handicapped," and after much debate, decided to carry the scooter to his apartment and give it back.

I guess it was the right thing to do, but you only get one opportunity to find a dumpster scooter.  Upon further analysis, having scootered and lost was probably a karmic reaction to us filling the box from our enormous new TV with a 30-year-old crooked fake Christmas tree, sealing it up, putting it by the dumpster and writing "Free!!!" on it.

The good news in all of this is that we made the handicapped neighbor wait to get his scooter back until we had taken enough pictures to take our own trip to the Grand Canyon: