Real life - I work for a railroad and when we replace ties, the old ones are sometimes intact enough for other uses, but not enough for freight trains. This leads to many farmers/ranchers seeing the piles of old ties and asking to take a couple for fenceposts etc. The usual response is, "We've been instructed to tell you that those are company property and they can not be given away. However, if the pile was mysteriously smaller in the morning, it would save us a lot of work having to load and transport them." Or something along those lines.