I was the director of a food pantry for 20 years. During that time, the church got flooded with 5 ft of water, and we lost a huge closet full of stored food. Even though much of it was stored on upper shelves and was untouched by water, it all had to be disposed of. Because we worked with government surplus food, the clipboard men got involved. It all needed to be brought to the dump. In the three days it took to get the clipboard men involved the bags of pasta and oatmeal bloated and erupted, so shovels and many trash cans were needed for cleanup. My teenaged son and I spent hours emptying out that room and literally pouring it all into my pickup truck bed. The weather was in the extra muggy high 80°s that week, so needless to say, it was hell.

I was told to meet clipboard man at the dump. He showed up in a white shirt and business suit. He wanted me to remove each item, one by one, so he could do his own inventory on his little clipboard, it didn't matter to him that I already had a current inventory for him. By then I was filthy, hot, and decidedly not in a good mood so I told him to feel free to get his skinny ass up on the truck and count things himself, and I gave my son the wave to proceed up the hill and start dumping. Clipboard man starts screaming that I'm not doing it right and I laughed as I got into the other truck and drove up the hill. Clipboard man then jumps into his car and follows us up the hill, runs to the edge of the large hole in the ground and yells at my son who is now shoveling the oozing mass of spoiled food and hundreds of now unlabeled canned goods into the dump hole. Once he saw what we were actually working with, he turned a little green around the gills and shut up.

Myself, clipboard man, and the dump superintendent all had to formally "witness" the guy in the huge dump stuff crusher machine pulverize every single can to assure that no one would try to resell any of this miserable stuff. The government is extremely picky with bad food, but the story of the clipboard man will always give me a good laugh. The spoiled food was covered by church insurance.

Denise in NH