When I lived in Japan I “gave” my TV to my younger brother in the States, but continued to use it while waiting for him to show up and retrieve it.
Whenever NHK, the national broadcaster would show up to collect the mandatory user fee, I refused to pay, explaining we did not own a TV.
Oh, and I aided and abetted in a fraud case. My older sister scored a Greyhound bus ticket, which was discounted for foreigners.
I went with her to the counter and “interpreted” for her, speaking Japanese and translating her gibberish answers into English.
Continuing my life of crime, I once filled in an official form in blue ink. All in lowercase letters. I’ve been waiting for that knock on the door for years now.
Suitcase nuke?
I once used a pesticide in a manner inconsistent with its labeling, which, according to a stern warning on the box, is a violation of federal law.
I once ordered a $7 LED light from Amazon - they sent me a box of 40 of them. I returned the entire box, and they never even refunded my money - the order’s still in a broken half-returned state, years later. So when I ordered a $16 drive bit set and they sent me a box of 20 of’em, well, I had many happy friends and cow-orkers that day, I tell you.
No.
When the new Thunderbird convertibles came back into product, I was on the low end of the hierarchy slinging car parts. My boss sent me to drop something off at an office near the T-bird storage lot.
Mind you, none of these cars were sold yet, we had only just begun production.
I made the drop off at the office, snuck outside to have a cigarette and admired the couple hundred T-birds parked near me. There were some inspectors walking about, checking cars, taking notes & driving some of the cars around. “Man! I’d love to take one of those T-birds for a spin!”
~light bulb above my head~ I found a clip board and pencil, walked with a bit of confidence and authority like I was someone you wouldn’t dare question, quickly hopped in a seafood green beauty and took off.
At the time, this auto plant I worked at was the largest company plant by square foot in all of North America. There is a road that circles completely around it with hilly parts, zig zags and hairpin turns for test driving.
The car had .78 miles on the odometer when I first got in.
Yes, I was technically still on company property so I didn’t steal it, but I was not authorized to drive vehicles outside the plant walls. if I’d have damaged it I would’ve been demoted to some crap job and who knows what else.
Also, when I fly, I’ve hidden illegal things in my luggage to imbibe in while on vacation.
Drove a tiny Fiat sedan in college that was narrow enough to squeeze past the parking garage gate arm without paying.
Stay for a second movie at the movie theater without paying for it. Always bring my own snacks.
Smuggle booze into booze-free park concerts.
Use the dumpster at work when I have something too large to fit in my garbage can instead of paying an extra fee for garbage overage.
Write the word “dumpster” without using proper capitalization for which the Dumpster® company has paid good money for. Also, “realtor”.
Boy, I always thought that was the dumbest law.
I did a similar thing, I was shopping with my infant daughter in her stroller, and was balancing all the items on the top hood. A roll of scotch tape slid off the top and got wedged down somewhere in the workings of the stroller. I saw it happen, I made a mental note to dig it out while waiting on line at the register … and then I completely forgot about it until I got home and it fell out on the floor.
I went back, hmm, I think two days later, and naturally my daughter picked that moment to have a screaming fit, and over the infant screaming, I tried to explain to the cashier that I needed to pay for the tape and it was this enormous process where he thought at first I wanted to return the tape and it took forever and everyone else waiting behind me hated me I’m sure.
Much earlier in my life, I committed credit card fraud, I think. It was just after college, I was young and didn’t have much money, and when I got my credit card bill, I saw that I had been charged twice for a train ticket back to my hometown. Outrageous! I called the credit card company and loftily demanded that one of the charges be removed, as clearly I was one person who purchased one ticket. In the conversation, I icily suggested that perhaps the ticket clerk had charged my card twice in error, although I was harboring suspicions – GRAVE suspicions – that the ticket clerk had nefariously charged my card twice and then refunded one ticket in cash and pocketed it. The credit card customer service rep agreed to remove one charge.
Then, THE TWIST. When I received my statement the following month, I saw that BOTH charges had been removed. Well, I felt guilty, so I called the credit card people again and tried to explain at length that I should be charged for ONE ticket, but not TWO … and after a long, confusing conversation the customer service person essentially said “Lady, we’re done here. What’s done is done. You need to hang up the phone now.” So I ended up not paying for either, but figured I had made an honest attempt to clarify it.
BUT HARK, A SECOND TWIST. Months, many months, after all of this, I ran into a person I knew from back home. It was a person I was friendLY with, although we were not close friends. I think I was friends with his sister. While we were chatting, he thanked me again for being so helpful that time we were coincidentally taking the same train back to our hometown, and he was at the ticket counter when he realized he had forgotten his credit card, and I offered to put his ticket on my card, and the next day he gave me the cash back for the cost. :smack::smack::smack: When he SAID it, I remembered it all happening quite clearly.
Maybe he went back to Oregon when it was time to “dispose of” the burrito.
This makes me curious. Is this a real thing in the US? I sure don’t have one on my (good old European) mattress! What’s it supposed to protect you from? Fake mattresses which might give under you, suffocate you, suddenly catch fire? Are there similar labels on, say, silverware (which seems to me to have a greater potential to cause harm!) in the US?
I got my first iPod circa late 2004,a birthday present from my husband, and proceeded to copy a good percentage of our CD collection into iTunes to transfer to my iPod. I later began to check out CD’s from the local library, and my husband copied them into iTunes. In my defense, the vast majority of these CD’s were music I’d owned on vinyl or cassette back in the day, and still had copies of some of them somewhere, in boxes; and my husband insisted on cleaning the CDs before he copied them, so the actual CDs were returned to the library in better condition then when I’d checked them out.
I shoplifted one single-serving bag of Pop Rocks from a store when I was 14, though I paid for all the other candy I bought. I wanted to see if I could get away with it. I did.
Napster early adopter. In my defense I didn’t realize.
Yeah, it’s a real thing.
If you poured it in the punchbowl at your senior prom, it no longer qualifies as a micro-crime.
Yes, but the law was never that the owner can’t remove the tag. Just that the sellers can’t.
The law is that the seller can’t remove the tag. The owner can.
Correct. The owner can remove the tag and not be prosecuted.