Not that sort of mutant

People like to give their old stuff to shelters. It's often a blessing, sometimes it's a pain in the ass (who needs that old bag of kitty litter, yo?) and sometimes it's a whole other situation altogether.

A few years ago I was running a housing program for thirty or so families. We had a general community center where staff offices, meeting rooms, and child care spaces were all located. Most days were chaotic, kids wandering in your office and ripping things off your walls while you are trying to finish a budget, or run screaming up and down the halls in wild abandon. It's actually pretty freaking cute.

We were having one of those days and needed a few minutes of quiet to work with a few mothers so we herded all of their kids (ones of the toddler variety), into the child care room thinking we'd put in a video and keep them occupied for 2 or 4 minutes.

A church group had just dropped off a giant cardboard box of used kid videos. There must have been 30 or 40 tapes in the box so I reached in and grabbed one - and I'll never forget the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles written on the label. Let's just ignore that as a previously childless person I chose TMNT to show to toddlers.

So I sit them all down and pop in the video and run out of the room to grab something. About 30 seconds later I returned to 5-6 toddlers gazing in amazement to what some might call hot bi-racial sex action with a very studly looking man with vanilla ice-esque hair on top of a rather lovely and bendable young woman.

In other words: HOLY SHIT.

I remember diving at the VCR, pulling the plug from the TV, and having a near nervous breakdown. The kids looked at me and said "What's that man doing? More show! More show!"

More show, indeed. I should have charged admission. Thanks Church People.

So after having to tell each of their moms exactly what happened (and thankfully, they were much less upset than I was imagining) we spent the rest of the day screening every single other tape. And incidentally, every other tape in that gigantic box was reflective of the label it proclaimed.

This is a long way of saying that when it comes to donations you can trust no one.

Especially not those wiley church people.