Story #12: A Plumber's Locker

I bought the locker because it had 5 sturdy shelves I needed for my business—worth about $900 new at Home Depot. At first glance, the rest looked like waste. But as I dug deeper, I found crates of plumbing supplies, over 100 lbs of high-grade copper pipes, several expensive pipe cutters—and then, oddly enough, piles of empty vintage Nintendo boxes.

The story slowly revealed itself. The unit belonged to a retired plumber. For decades, these tools had been his livelihood, the very instruments that put food on his table. When he left self-employment to work for a larger company, he couldn’t bring himself to sell them off. Instead, he stashed them away in storage, as though keeping the tools meant keeping a part of his identity.

And the Nintendo boxes? Maybe they once held gifts for kids or were reminders of a younger, lighter chapter of life. Empty to anyone else, but clearly worth saving to him.

The lesson wasn’t financial. It was about human tendency to hold onto objects long after their use has passed, because they remind us of who we were. To him, these weren’t just pipes and boxes. They were tokens of work, pride, and memory.

In the end, lockers often reveal less about what people owned and more about what they couldn’t let go of.