Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Rolling towards the truth

My friends, I was sitting at lunch today, watching my friend enjoy her flavoured Arizona beverage and I saw her pull the tab off the top of the can. That got us thinking. I'm sure you've all heard the urban legend that if you collect enough tabs a wheel chair will be supplied to the local hospital (some versions dictate that the tabs are actually melted down to make the wheel chair, others insist there's some sort of trade involved). We wondered, does this really happen? Is there some charitable organization that collects the tabs for wheelchairs or have we all been fooled?
Since first grade I've been told over and over to save my tabs and it felt good to know that I was helping some kid roll his way to a better life. Now I'm not so sure, so I did a little research to find out if this was fact or fiction?
Unfortunately my friend with the Arizona was no help as she would give her tabs to her grandmother, who took them to their local church and lost track of them after that. So I loaded up google, typed in "pop can tab" and went to work. Results are sketchy at best.
Depending on where you search you will find a number of different answers ranging from "hell yeah it works," to "nice try, find something worth your time."
However, one name that came up several times was a Ray Pearse who turned the story from urban legend to reality. I feel like I'm going to have to take a deeper look into this and I am quickly running out of time to do it.
This is definitely not over.

No comments: