The department handles property that has completed its useful life at the university. A small fraction is recycled, sold for scrap, or thrown away, but the vast majority winds up for sale at “Dispo’s” retail warehouse on the east end of North Campus.

“Word of mouth is a big advertisement,” says Lyon, the department’s operations manager. A small but dedicated group of regulars stop by to pick through new offerings on a daily basis. The store is open only to university employees on Fridays, and Lyon says there’s always a line when the store reopens to the public at 12:30 p.m. Monday: “They want to be the first here to see what they missed that was delivered Thursday afternoon and Friday.”

Since the department receives four to five box trucks of cast-offs daily, there’s a lot to keep up on. Lyon says Dispo “would love to see more” customers and in recent years has begun using eBay and other online vendors to sell some specialty items. The department also recently joined Facebook.

Furniture is one of the most common products on the warehouse’s expansive cement floor; there are some couches and tables, lots of office chairs and desks. PCs are plentiful, too, lined up on shelves four rows high and bargain priced in the $75 range. Most university departments swap out their machines on a regular basis, but life cycles depend on their needs and income. Lyon says that some thrifty units actually buy their computers from Dispo.

Staffers can rattle off all sorts of oddities that have popped up over the years. “I tell everybody I’ve sold everything but a train,” says warehouse manager Steve Sinelli. Over his forty-three years working for Dispo, Sinelli has sold surplus cars, fire trucks, an airplane, and a remotely operated submarine.

While Dispo receives plenty of specialty equipment, some pieces are more valuable than others. Lyon recalls a DNA extraction machine that sat on the floor for “a very long time,” simply because it had become obsolete. But in some cases obsolete is good. When Hatcher Graduate Library got rid of 120 card catalog cabinets about five years ago, Lyon says, people were “calling from all across the country” about them. They all sold within a month at $125 apiece, and Lyon says she still gets calls asking if Dispo has any more.

Working among so many curiosities, Dispo employees occasionally see one they can’t resist. Sinelli has an old postage stamp vending machine in his office; Lyon–whose whole office is furnished with Dispo stock–has a massive pair of size-nineteen Adidas in hers.

Lyon’s proudest purchase was a six-foot-tall Big Bird statue from the old C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. To her bafflement, her regular customers seemed completely uninterested in it. “After it sat on the floor for three or four days, I bought it,” she says. “I had to take it home in the front seat of my Mustang convertible.”