The Storied Life of an Ugly Love Seat

A summer job that I had in high school and early college was working at Studdard Moving and Storage in Leavenworth.  During one of my college summers, probably in 1998, we were doing a delivery in Belton, and while unloading the furniture, the homeowner saw that a love seat was being unloaded, and she commented that was surprised to see it, because it was supposed to be thrown away at their old house.  Somehow it got included in the shipment.  She asked us if we could haul it away and throw it away for her.  I was living in the fraternity house then, and I knew my roommate and I could use it in our room, so I asked the lady if I could have it, and she agreed.  Of course she didn't mind since she was ready to throw it out, but I had to have her sign something, per company policy.  So we hauled it back to the warehouse, and then it made its way to my house in Lansing and then to Manhattan for the school year.  It was in that room (Room 5), and I kept it for my next room (Room 21).  It was in that room that it sustained damage, as its arm was used as a springboard to get to the top bunk, and the arm eventually caved in.  It then moved with me to The Lodge, the nickname for the house I lived it at the tail end of my college career.  There it sustained further abuse.  One of my roommates, Bob, who was not a light man, slept on it during the night and often during the day, as it was a couch out in the common area.  It then went with me to Lawrence when I lived with Mom and Ron for almost a year in Lawrence.  Somehow, Meghan allowed it in our first house in Olathe, as it was the couch in my office.  When we moved to this house, she said we should get rid of it, but I convinced her to take it with us, as we might need it in the basement.  So it's been in the basement of this house until recently when she convinced me that it really needed to go, as we moved our yellow couch from Clara's room to the basement, so I couldn't even justify keeping it as a basement couch since we now had a different and better one.  So I moved it up to the garage in preparation for its departure.  We recently cleaned up and cleaned out our basement, and we ended up with enough big things that we decided to pay for the bulk pick-up to get rid of the items we didn't need, and among them was the couch.  Amazingly, I've now been the owner of this couch for nearly half my life, so I decided to document its demise.  It was actually quite impressive.  The truck was kind of awesome.  It had a giant extending arm with a huge claw at the end, and it reached down and grabbed/crushed the couch and then lifted it over the bed of the truck, and then dropped it into the bed and then brought the claw down to violently smash the couch and the other contents.  And thus, the ugly, somewhat uncomfortable couch that had somehow become an enduring part of my life was gone.  Farewell, my friend.  You had no business surviving that long through multiple owners and multiple moves, but you did.  You had a good run.