oldscratch,
That is one strange story. What would be sad is if you actually came by it legitimately. But at least it went to good causes. What would also be tragic is if someone ultimately tracked you down and demanded the money back.
Anyway, best of luck with your condition.
. . . just to watch it die? 
My dad put the fear of God in us early so I never stole anything that hadn’t been already mine.
Let me clarify: I grew up in a small country town and we lived outside the city limits. There was only one girl in our neighborhood for my sister and I to play with. She was actually pretty nice (still get together with her occasionally now and then) but went through this “sticky finger” stage when we were in our Barbie collector ages. She would continually “borrow” things from my sister and I even though we never recall giving her permission. Anyway, we just started borrowing the stuff back from her. Even doing that, I kept thinking I was going to get caught and she would beat me up! She was a pretty chubby little girl and we used to call her (behind her back) “Her Name…Bubble Butt”. Geez, kids are cruel!
I stole makeup. Lots of makeup. I got caught by my parents, but nothing came of it.
Then I got a job. Now I just swipe office supplies .
I steal food from work on a regular basis. Oooh.
Besides that my brother and I (unknowingly) stole a whole stack of Auto-Trader’s, once.
That reminds me of when I was working at a card shop. A little old lady that came in at least every month had been in shopping and she forgot to stop by the counter and pay. She came back in with her card looking all worried. (It was a 90 cent card.) She told me she found it in her hand when she went to get her change ready for the bus. I thanked her very much for coming back, but I was concerned that she was going to miss her bus now. She insisted that we needed to ring it up right now because she might forget before she came back again. She just didn’t think she could live with herself if she didn’t pay for it right then.
Anyway, let this be a lesson to you young’uns, a salesperson will either believe you or not care anyway, as long as you came back to give it back or pay for it. (Yeah, like 11 year olds read this board.)
I realized on the New Year’s Eve when I was 21 that I had never stolen anything in my life. So, my resolution for that year was to steal something. Soon thereafter, I went out bowling with most of my siblings (we’re not the kind of family that does ANYTHING together, which is why it sticks out in my mind.), and I stole a pair of bowling shoes. I showed 'em to my sister Kirsten afterwards, expecting her to lecture me or something, but she just laughed. They’re maroon and gray. I still have them, but I haven’t stolen anything since.
When I was six I stole marbles from a desk on a dare. When David found his beloved marbles missing, he started to bawl. I still feel pretty crappy about it.
At McDonald’s they have a time limit on how a product can sit in the bin. Once the limit is up, the food gets chucked. So I’d always ask to go on my break just as some burgers were about to be tossed and grab one to eat. In my mind it wasn’t stealing because I was keeping this food from going to waste and saving more of my piddly little paycheck.
Then in college, I was working for an old, old movie theater that was schelduled to be shut down at the end of the summer. A month before the closing we got a new manager. He had asked for a transfer from another theater expecting to get assigned to the new megaplex and instead got this dead-end assignment. So aside from being a greedy jerk, he also had an axe to grind.
So he’d tell the customers that the ticket machine was busted, take their money, and issue them a handwritten ticket. Later he’d ring in half the tickets and keep the rest of the money.
All of us employees wanted nothing to do with it and refused to work the ticket counter when he was doing his skimming scheme. However, we never turned him in and looking back on it, I feel that us keeping silent was just as deceitful.
Well I’ll just say that if I ever own my own company and want to have somebody handle cash sales that were not on the books so as to avoid tax I would make damn sure I got somebody who I trusted to handle the 1000’s of pounds that cross hands and not a 17 year old who felt he was getting screwed and thought he was untouchable.
Beaker - keeping silent was the wrong thing to do. You should have demanded your cut.
Only shoplifting I’ve done was a porno I stole from a local video store. Course, with my luck it turned out to be a documentary on a swimsuit model and contained no nudity.
I used to not steal because of an intense fear of getting caught. Now I dont really care, but I can’t think of anything worth stealing. As a kid, you could steal anything and know you’d never get that bad a punishment, now anything I could want that I can’t pay for myself, the penalties just aren’t worth it.
Friend of mine from AOL is 15. She stole a car a few months ago and went on a joyride. Got a slap on the wrist. The things we teach our children these days…
Actually this guy was latter 20s, married, and had a kid. The system was easily manipulated because the theater was old and the ticket machine wasn’t computerized. Otherwise, upper management could have looked at the records and seen that all the tickets were “purchased” within minutes of each other rather than over a period of a few hours. I’m not sure his scheme would work at newer theaters.
I routinely steal witticisms and insights from posters on this board and use them in essays or conversations or stories…
Have you ever taken those “pre-employment screening” tests where they ask if you’ve EVER stolen anything?
I had a rep from the test company explain it to me.
I assumed you should answer Yes, because everyone has. There are zero exceptions.
However, he said his company would mark you down as unhirable for only 3 such honest answers.
His reasoning: No applicant would want a Yes answer shown to his employer unless he thought it was common.
Since most people lie on the question, he said only the most inured to theft would admit it openly.
Needless to say, I never signed up for his “service”.
I stole a loaf of bread, and Jean Valjean hunted me down for years through the sewers of Paris…
Wait… I think that was the plot of Les Misérables, which I fell asleep at…
I stole the heart of a thousand women.
Okay, seriously. You know what “Blackouts” are, right? My friends and I used to ride around at night and steal them, then sell them to people we knew with the same cars. I don’t think we ever actually sold a pair, we just ended up giving them away, or keeping them ourselves. I think I still have a few pair here, somewhere. I should break 'em, or go around and put them on cars. I dunno. The funny part was, though, usually the ones we stole had been stolen before.
I worked in a Price Chopper, nights. There was never anyone there. We used to go up the office supplies aisle, and steal cool stuff, like cool pens and stuff. We also stole alot of candy bars, one time Jon stole an entire carton of Reese’s Stix. For dinner, we’d often steal from the Deli, or grift a bag of chips or something. We were pretty good.
My friends used to steal clothes at the mall, but I never had the balls. I did steal stuff from Wal-Mart, though, who hasn’t? You go to the Quilting section, no one’s ever there, and there’s no cameras. Hide it under a quilt, reach in, rip it open, and tuck it up your sleeves.
I haven’t stolen in years. My sisters do, now. I haven’t turned them into my parents, but when I found out, I sat them down, and told them about what I used to do. At the end, I said “Know this. You will get caught. The day you started, you marked yourself. One day, one time, somewhere and somehow, you will be caught. Keep that in mind.”
I don’t think they’ve stolen since.
I never was caught, though. IIRC, I quit just before my 18th birthday. That was planned.
–Tim
I stole a peanut from a grocerystore when i was 3 and my mom figured it out and the things she said about stealing and going to jail and stuff scared me enough that i never shoplifted again.
I did steal a book from a friend that she had stole from another friend. She had gone on about how she always thought of him fondly when she read the book and did not think taking it was wrong. I think of her fondly when i read it.
()_ <—blinky orange light bit
I___I <—case bit holding 2 6v lantern batteries
Y’know those orange blinking lights they have bolted to the barricades at road construction sites? I’ve got one.
Gunslinger, I can top that. My friend and I put the whole darn saw horse barricade in her trunk. I don’t remember what happened after that, but gee that was fun. I think we ditched it somewhere like in the middle of a neighborhood or something because the orange blinking glow could be seen coming from the edges of the trunk lid. I just remember laughing until my sides hurt because the whole rear end of her car was blinking. I’m so ashamed. 
As a yute, I stole the only thing that needed to be stolen … porn.
In college, I do recall lifting a bottle of champagne from a party, which we took to the local pizza joint and had pizza and champagne.
The best scam we ever came up with was in college when I and several friends worked as housekeeping/maintenance one summer in the dorms. There were a lot of highschoolers who were there for events or classes, and we took the booze they had in their rooms (we always left them some). It was the perfect crime – the kids couldn’t tell on us.
Finally, I don’t know if this would be considered stealing, but we always crashed cocktail parties on campus and pretended that we belonged there for the free food and booze.
My fraternity occasionally acquired furniture as ours died, but it wasn’t stealing – we put a sign on the inside of the door which read “storage closet”, so anything we brought in was merely being “taken out of storage”.
Sua
My old roommate had the best theft – he removed an airplane warning light from the top of the clock tower at college. Quite a feat of moutaineering. I believe he still has it. BTW, he’s a rabbi now.
Sua