I think I need to burn my clothes.

I am posing a question.

If there is a building, let's say a house.

And if said house is filthy, I mean really, really filthy, with cigarette butts on the floor, mold issues, various unpleasant odors, trash thrown about, food stuffs left to rot, old formerly wet but now dry and mildewed towels draped on the stripped matresses, clothes in heaps and left about, and a deactivated aquarium filled with scummy water and the earthy remains of fish...

Would it still be acceptable to leaf through the piles of refuse to salvage various items, items that might, if not associated with the house in any way, be valuable?

For example, say several employees go over to a house recently aquired by their parent company. The house is scheduled to be demolished. They are given the opportunity to look at the horror before it is broken into rubble.

Then they find a breadmaker in the basement while they are--no kidding--looking for corpses in the basement, with all the court date notices. And the breadmaker is in its box, unused.

Would it still be okay for them to take the breadmaker, if the employer/new owner took no issue with the idea, and would it be acceptable for them to use it and feed people the bread that comes from it without telling them about where it came from?

That house really exists and so does the breadmaker. And people think I am strange for wanting to torch all contained within the house, even though it really needs containment. Serious containment.

I had an asthma attack just looking at that house.

It was so bad that, when I got back to the library, I had to take off each of my shoes in turn, scrub each one with its own seperate Chlorox wipe, then throw each wipe away before washing my hands with a Chlorox wipe and then going into the bathroom and washing my hands with soap and very hot water.

Yes, Jennifer, it does make sense to wash your shoes, even the bottoms of them, from time to time to avoid tracking human...fluids...into your place of employment, or worse--your home!

It was bad, very bad.

I think we should drench that house with gasoline and have the fire department contain the blaze. I think it's very important that anything and everything inside that house goes back to Hell where it came from.

They have a door in that house, a serious, honest-to-goodness door, that has a sign on it and the sign reads: "Never Open This Door!!!"

I bet if you open that door, you see a man sitting down with a cloth pulled over his head, and some big black orb hovering over his head. And if you come closer to the door, the orb will part and glow in a freaky way, and it will zap some sort of light at you, maybe killing you but probably turning you into some kind of monster-spawn, to skitter over the earth sucking people's brains out through their ear canals, or maybe their sinuses.

I promise you not a soul on that tour wanted to open that door to see what was inside. But if we had, we would have been totally defenseless, because not one of us knows any kind of karate, not even a little bit. The most I can do is the move Gran taught me, where you walk up behind someone while they're relaxed and watching TV, then karate chop them with both hands on either side of their neck as hard as you can. This has been known to cause blackouts.

I don't know about the rest of us, here, but I know for darn sure that I will be watching to see which one of my co-workers takes that breadmaker home. And the next time they bring in home made bread, I will be abstaining.

But really, in this instance...

Am I the crazy one? Is something like a breadmaker, or an article of clothing with tags still attached, tainted by association?

I think you all know my opinion.