I hoped that this would end up with you finding a severed head in the toolbox, but I suppose that this is not that sort of thread.
When I was in High School, needing money and having no social life I worked Friday and Saturday nights as a dishwasher in a local “Motor Inn” (an upscale Sheraton motel with a very nice restaurant). Unfortunately the position attracted the wrong sort of young man; it was rare that a dishwasher wasn’t living better through chemistry on his shift. After the restaurant closed and the chefs had cleaned up, we were the only ones left in the kitchen. Although we got a free dinner over the course of the evening, we found ourselves hungry at the end of the evening, so the dessert chefs (thinking they knew teenagers) would leave the ice cream locker open for us. Alas, that was not nearly enough. We learned to sneak steaks and pre-prepared meals (like shrimp in butter and bread crumbs) out of the refrigerator and cook them after hours. Then we started setting a table for ourselves using the good table linens. Then we found our way into the wine closet and were having a pretty good time of it while it lasted. *
Oh damn. I just started a Pit thread stating that “I am not a crook!” and then I post this. Well. Hmmm. It’s a fair cop, but I blame society. Anyway, I was young and stupid, and I’m not young anymore.
*Eventually one of us left a bottle of wine cooling in the dessert freezer and forgot about it. We were all fired, so I guess that we didn’t totally get away with it.
Was pulled over in college for “failure to yield right-of-way to an emergency vehicle,” which is a fancy way of saying I was on the freeway and a cop hit his lights behind me and I didn’t immediately get out of his way.
I was on my way to a party and I was a minor with two large bottles of vodka-spiked OJ in the car and so I was too paranoid to immediately know to move over. (Chances of the cops going, “Open up those bottles of Minute Maid! We know they’re spiked with The Demon Liquor!” are of course pretty low, but paranoia isn’t rational by definition.)
So that cop got on the radio to another cop and said, “Pull her over! She didn’t get out of my way!”
Well, in addition to the vodka-spiked OJ, I also had an expired license, expired registration, and expired insurance.
And the cop, after telling me that I was looking at “hundreds of dollars in tickets,” for all my expired crap and for the “failure to yield” for which I was initially pulled over, let me go scot-free.
One afternoon in high school, I brought my stuff home and changed there before going back to the school for cross country practice, bringing only my car keys with me. On the way back home, I was doing between 35 and 40 in a 25 zone on a semi-arterial road and I got stopped. The officer was a young lady who had me sit in the back of the squad car while she ran my plates or something like that, and told me about how the fines I was facing would run up to $125 (speeding, driving without a liscence). She asked me how I thought my parents would like that.
“I don’t think they’d like it at all.”
After that, she let me go. I suspect that it having been my first ever traffic violation might have been a factor.
I’m enjoying all of these responses so far, and am thusly encouraged to note an experience of my own that fits more with the criminal theme running through this thread.
When I was about 18, I saved up enough money to buy myself a fancy new 28.8 modem to enhance my BBSing experience. One day, I headed over to Radio Shack with a co-worker to make my grand purchase. I had $200 in cash on me for the job. Unfortunately, when the modem I’d chosen was rung up, it came out to a total of about $220. Fortunately, my co-worker was kind enough to volunteer to put the amount over $200 on her card. The cashier had no problem with this.
So the cashier asks to take my co-worker’s portion first, and he runs the charge for the approximately $20. While he’s doing this, he notices that there are no longer any bags up front. So after having my co-worker sign the statement, he goes in the back of the store and grabs a bag for the modem. He comes back out with a bag, sticks the modem and receipt inside, hands it to me, and tells us to have a nice day.
My co-worker and I share a quick glance before simultaneously spinning and walking out of the door. Quickly.
I didn’t work with my co-worker much longer after that, as we were working a summer job, so I don’t know if they ever came after her (they obviously had her credit card info). I also don’t know if the cashier was fired after coming up $200 short in his register that day (it was nearly 10 years before I ever returned to that location). But I do know that I only paid a total of $40 (this includes the $20 that I repaid the co-worker for the portion she put out) for a $220 modem. And at 18, I was feeling pretty damn good about how clever I was.
I don’t know that it was necessarily illegal, but I marched for about a block in the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York one year. My roommate and I had gone to NY for spring break to visit some friends, and one day while we were wandering around in the city we ran into the parade. We just wanted to get across the street and didn’t feel like waiting for the entire parade to go by, so at an opportune moment we jumped into the parade, walked up the street for about a block, then jumped out on the other side.
For the entire year I lived in my last apartment, I paid to get rid of my garbage at the local landfill less than half a dozen times. Every other time the garbage was snuck into a dumpster at the hospital I worked at in the middle of the night. The reasoning behind this is that is would have cost me $5 a week to get rid of my one bag of garbage. Yes, ONE bag was $5 and that was me DRIVING IT TO THE LANDFILL, not curbside pick up. Well, it wasn’t that one bag was $5, but anything less than 40 pounds was $5, and I coldn’t make that much in a week, and had no place to store the garbage so I could take over three or four bags and still pay just $5, so dumpster it was.
Once, about 15 years ago, I was stopped out in the country in BFE, South Carolina, going 60 in a 55 down a long hill. I did not get a ticket, just a warning.
And the fact that I had a half-ounce of weed in the glovebox went unnoticed, fortunately.
Drove the wrong way down a one-way street because I was tired and didn’t notice the signs.
For those of you in the Boston area, the one-way street in question was Mass Ave.
Luckily, it was 3am and the area was deserted. I didn’t realize what I’d done until a few minutes after I’d pulled off and started thinking, “waitaminute… how’d I manage to get here… :eek:” I was wide awake the rest of the way.
One day in 1979, he was riding down the highway on an unregistered Honda CB 125. He’d had his license suspened earlier that year, and hadn’t gotten it back yet, so driving an unregistered bike probably wasn’t the best idea – especially considering the sizeable bag of weed he was carrying in his right jacket pocket, and the ounce of coke in his left – but, his inhibitions being somewhat inhibited by the large quantity of alcohol he’d consumed earlier (at the age of 18), he was doing it anyway. At 95 miles per hour.
All of a sudden, he sees flashing lights behind him.
Pulling onto the shoulder, he stops, and for a moment, so does his heart. He knows he can’t outrun the cop car even if he were brave enough to try. He knows he can’t talk his way out it. He’s completely and utterly fucked beyond all hope of recovery. His only thoughts are to wonder how many years it’ll be before the next time he sees daylight. The policeman walks up beside the bike, and says…
“Sorry, lookin’ for a Harley. Go on your way. Have a good night.”
If he didn’t have a witness – and if that witness weren’t my mom, who was on the back seat of the bike at the time and would never let him get away with making up a story like this – I wouldn’t have believed it for a minute. But he insists it’s true, and she backs him up, so it happened. The downside of it was that it seems to have used up his full life’s allotment of Good Luck Points, which certainly holds true to this day.
I had a VIP pass that allows you to the VIP lounge and bar but it DOESN’T allow you into the skyboxes that are up on the same level.
I went wondering down this looong hallway that connects all the adjacent skyboxes together. (imagine like the hallway of a large hotel) I was in search of a restroom. Halfway down the hall one of the skyboxes had their door open (to the hallway) There were a bunch of people in there partying.
Just as I’m walking by minding my own bussiness, this dude pops out and says “Frank!! Where the hell you been man?!” Even tho’ Frank isn’t my name I still felt compelled to answer him “Oh I don’t know look’n for this place I guess.”
He then told me to come in and help myself to all the beer and hotwings I could handle.
I actually didn’t get away with this because about thirty minutes into it a friend of his had to instruct him that I indeed was NOT “Frank.” But the drunk bastard was so impressed that I actually had the balls to try and pull something like that off, he told me to stay anyway. (As long as I was a Cowboys fan. His words not mine. which I was and am.)
Only two people in our office are allowed to make cash deposits. One of them was going on vacation when I collected a rather large amount of cash, and told me to have the other person do it.
A member of person #2’s family died that weekend, so both of them ended up being away for a few days.
Nobody ever mentioned or noticed the missing deposit.
Since 9/11 I’ve gotten a knife on an airplane twice.
A small knife, but a knife nonetheless. I didn’t mean to, and only realized it in line at security. When I arrived at my destination, I put it in my checked luggage, so that I’d check it instead of carry it.
A few days after getting home from my freshman year of college, I met some friends in one of their driveways. I had a quarter gram of weed in my pocket. All three had been drinking in one of their cars, and seemed slightly drunk. After arriving, I had a beer myself. When they decided to go to Burger King, I was too timid and stupid to try to dissuade them.
At a light, the driver turned into the wrong lane, where a cop happened to be sitting. He quickly adjusted and we laughed it off, but the cop stopped us in the Taco Bell parking lot. My friend lied about drinking, then failed her sobriety test. She ordered us out of the car and searched it thouroughly, finding a pipe, a grinder and other drug paraphrenalia, but no actual pot, amazingly missing my friend’s hiding place (inside the covered mug in the front cupholder).
When she patted down the driver and the front passenger, I began trembling. I thought she would search me and find the weed in my pocket, ruining my life after I just started college. Luckily, again, she didn’t. She asked me how many beers I had and how long ago, and I answered truthfully: one about 45 minutes ago. I passed her sobriety test and after giving us a speech she let me drive us home. We thanked her sincerely.
I still can not believe how luckily my friends and I were that night. If the cop had not been so kind or her search so careless, my life might be very different today.
