What have you gotten away with?

In My Humble Opinion
41

At the ripe old age of 18, there were four of us cruising down an Intestate highway with a case of beer. Glass bottles. Over the course of 60 to 80 miles we felt it was our duty to empty a bottle into ourselves and then toss the bottle from the wildly moving car and hit the billboard exit sign. If we missed the sign, we had to stop the car, pick up the bottle or at least the larger fragments, back up a hundred yards or so and try again.

It’s been 40 years and I’ll still astounded we didn’t get caught by the cops or killed backing up on a divided Interstate highway. :smack:

42

Lots. As a teenager, I believed it was easier to apologize than to ask for permission, and you only had to apologize if you got caught!

As an adult, we had taken all the kids to a famous aquarium where we wanted to buy annual passes. We were told at the ticket kiosk that we had to get them either online or inside at the information booth. Everyone was escorted in and we never found the booth and just toured the facility as if we’d paid like everyone else. Free aquarium for everyone.
Yes, it was very wrong.

43

Back in 1978, money had to be put into a pay phone in order to get a dial tone. I made a call form a payphone near my apartment, and picked up the receiver and heard a dial tone. I made my call and it went through without any money being put in…

Two days later, I went to the phone to make a long diistance call (hey, what’s wrong with ripping off Ma Bell), and the phone asked me for money.I hung up and it was like hitting the slots at Vegas! A bunch of money fell out–Obvsiously, money that people had put in not realizing the phone had a glitch and local calls were free.

I got around $50 in change.

44

ONE: During my senior year of high school we were supposed to write autobiographies for a religion class (Catholic, all girls high school). The teacher of this class, while nice enough, was very nosy. We didn’t really feel like writing our own personal stuff for her to read so we wrote autobiographies for each other.

They were sordid and full of things like incest, rape and alcoholism. Well, my friend turned one in that said her mother was an alcoholic. The rest of the year we got out of class once in a while to go to Al-anon meetings. The teacher even lent us her car.
TWO: Same friend. We both had the same government class Senior year. The nun teaching this class was old and going through chemotherapy Since my friend and I looked similar, had the same first name and wore the same clothes every day I’m not sure she knew there were two of us.

I didn’t do anything in the class and got a C. I did not do one thing… at one point she called on me to give an oral report, which I hadn’t prepared for, and my friend got up and gave hers. I was never called on again.

45

Just last week I went to the theatre with a friend. We didn’t have tickets, and had heard the performance was sold out, but thought we would ask at the box office an hour before the show started.

My friend specifically asked for “student rush” tickets, as she had a student ID card, and we were told that yes, seats had become available… right in the middle of the first row of the dress circle, A reserve premium fancypants seats. She bought one for $30, and the ticket seller looked over to me, and asked politely to see MY student card. Eep. I am not a student, and haven’t been for a handful of years. So, I blagged that I had “forgotten” my card, pulled an “essay” out of my bag (it was actually a work document), offered to pay full price, and looked all sad when she told me it would be $150.

She sold me the ticket for $30.

I love blagging.

46

I can think of several things, but this is probably the most fortunate.
It was 1969 and I’m on my second tour in VN. I was assigned to a detachment that operated a rock quarry making gravel and asphalt for reconstruction of QL-1, the main north/south highway in So. Vietnam. Our camp was near the water and at the base of a small mountain where the quarry was located. Our camp, like most, was closed from sunset to sunrise. I shared a hooch w/ the chief corpsman and, on this particular ocassion, we both needed to go north to the Army/Marine complex at Phu Bai the following morning and decided to go together. We pulled out shortly after sunrise in a Jeep and made our trip. On our return we discovered a civilian truck blown up about a hundred yards north of our camp, where we had passed through an hour or so before. Apparently the Jeep hadn’t been heavy enough to set off the improvised land mine planted during the night. The VC were very clever and one of their tactics was to cut a small section of asphalt, dig a hole, plant the device (often an unexploded artillery shell), then replace the section of asphalt and seal the patch w/ gasoline which melts the tar. This would take them most of the night, but they were obviously very determined.
I drove that road many times, both before and after that incident. After, I was always wary of suspicious looking spots, but it just wasn’t possible to avoid all of them. Thankfully we got very lucky that day and possibly other times that I was totally unaware of, I’ll never know.

47

Copyright violations. I mean, not plagarism, and I never made any money off of it, but…yeah.

I don’t know if Dante had a place in Hell picked out for that, or not.

Oh, and I once passed a car on the right…but only because I was driving in the wrong lane.

At 80 mph.

On Market Street.

As I went through a red light.

And did I mention it was a patrol car?

Of course, that was all on a computer game…but still, I managed to get away, scot free. :smiley:

48

Hey, I got processed just after you on that same day!

Standing by the table, I looked down and noticed a foil packet by my foot. Trouble was, the cop noticed it at the same moment

Ten years! Ten years in that hellhole of a prison. Weight-lifting. Brooding. Wondering who put me there. Waiting. Oh so patiently waiting.
OK, not really. :slight_smile:

But it’s a nice idea for a story.

A light-hearted revelation on a message-board. Somewhere, thousands of miles away perhaps, a man stares balefully at a computer screen and whispers, “You!”
As to the question in the thread, my wife ensures that I get away with NOTHING!

49

Wow…that’s a lotsa dimes!!!
I was pulled over for having a headlight out, but had been drinking and was brought to the state troopers barracks for a breath test (after performing, and failing, those totaly humiliating roadside sobriety tests (what with the traffic passing by and everyone slowing down to get a good look at the stupid drunk assshole)).

Turned out that they were fresh out of the little plastic blow-tubes that attach to the machine, so I was “given a break” and they let me go. Although I got away with it, it was enough of a lesson learned to never D&D again.

50

Give him a prize for being a big fat liar. I rode a CB125 myself in 1979 and the only way it would have got up to 95mph would have been down a cliff. There was about one street-legal 250 in those days that would have been good for 95. :dubious: :stuck_out_tongue:

51

Funny, I went on a tour of the Capitol when I was in DC last year, and rode the subway legally (or, at least, unless our guide was breaking the rules I was doing it legally). Being the guest of a senator probablly helped.

That said, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten away with anything too bad (other than some minor drug offences, which I think you can all guess.). Oh, I bought drinks before I was eighteen and for friends afterwards, and I paid student rates for travel until my stubble started getting really noticeable. Unfortunately, the two offences rely one to look different ages. :frowning:

52

Well I am very ashamed to admit it, but I have driven drunk on more occassions than I would like to admit :frowning: (I don’t do this anymore!!)

One evening, we went to dinner and I had about 4 beers, then we went to the movies (I did not drive there). We watched the movie, and I drank one of those gigantic sodas, then 2 1/2 hours later we left and I drove home. We drove through a sobriety checkpoint, and I didn’t think much of it because there is no way I could be drunk after 4 beers, a mega soda and hours later, right? Well, there were 4 lanes and 3 of the 4 were making the driver blow into a breathalyzer. Mine was the lane without the breathalyzer. The cop asked if I had anything to drink, I said no, and I drove through. My friend who was in another car (who had nothing to drink) was asked to blow. I am lucky because in hindsight, I think if I had been asked to blow, I probably would have registered, although probably below the limit.

I have also spent an ungodly amount of time surfing the SDMB and various other forms of slacking off, while I should be working.

53

One time I ordered around $50 of books for class from Amazon and I got sent two packages (only charged for one). I returned the surplus books to Borders and received a gift card for the full amount. Then I wound up not using one of the books (it was a fiction book for a lit class, and we didn’t get around to reading it), so I returned THAT one (to the same store!) and got another gift card. I’d do it again today, I would.

Also, my last year of college I did not live in the dorms and did not have a meal plan, preferring to make my own meals at my apartment. But on some days, when you just need a little food… yeah, I snuck into the buffet-style dining hall and put a few sandwiches in my bag. I would also do that again.

54

You’re absolutely correct. I relayed this story to a friend of mine who’s MIL is a Congresswoman. Staff members are allowed to bring guests with them, so apparently lots of members of the public do get to ride the subway – just not by themselves, the way I did.

SP2263’s Catholic school story reminded me of my freshman year at my all boy’s Catholic high school. I was always pretty good at scoring well on tests and class participation, but I almost never did my homework. Essays and term papers were simply out of the question. I couldn’t make myself sit down and spend time on things like that, even if I knew the material.

So in my first year Religious Studies class, we were assigned a five-page essay on something or other. We had about a month to work on it. I, of course, didn’t do one. The next day, my teacher confronted me, saying that he hadn’t found my paper among the ones he’d graded. I insisted that I’d done mine and that he must have lost it (I assume this tactic must have worked for me in elementary school at some point – I have no idea why I thought this would work). Well, he quite accurately called me a liar, and called my mom in for a parent-teacher conference.

Clearly out of my mind at this point, I continued with my lie in front of my mom, shed tears and insisted that I’d turned the paper in. So my teacher said that that was fine. If I’d actually turned one in, I should still have it on my computer. I fumbled some excuse about having not saved it or the like. So he said that if I’d worked so hard on it, I should be able to pretty well recreate it from memory, right? He gave me until the next morning to turn in the paper. To this day, I don’t quite know how I pulled together all the information I did between 10pm and 5am, and I certainly didn’t manage any sleep, but I turned in the paper and actually got an A+ on it.

The teacher never doubted me again, but I also never missed another assignment in his class.

55

Yeah, I’ve got one of these. :slight_smile:

It was the night before my friend’s wedding. Because they were doing everything a little low-budget, we had to decorate the reception hall ourselves, at two in the morning, after the previous revelers had left. The bride and I took a quick trip back to her house for the streamers we forgot, and on the way back to the reception hall, I ran a red light because I was talking.

I answered honestly when asked how much I’d had to drink (two rum & cokes about three hours before with a late dinner), and passed my sobriety test with flying colors, while inside I was sweating the fact that the ounce of weed I’d bought earlier that day had been inside a candy tin in the glove box, right next to my registration.

I think the worst part wouldn’t have been the arrest or the humiliation or the ruination of my life or anything like that. It’s that my friend would never forgive me for getting nailed the night before I was supposed to be her Maid of Honor. :slight_smile:

56

I do too.

I just finished college, decided to go cross country with my boyfriend (at the time). We took route 80 West , going to California. I was driving. We were on our second day out, still in Pennsylvania maybe 5 miles short of Ohio, when the driver’s side tires got stuck in a rut on the road. Uneven pavement type of thing. I was going about 65mph, and I tried to get the car out of the rut, and in so doing it swerved into the right lane and into the path of an approaching Winnebago. I jerked the wheel back to the left, but that was too much for my little car (Nissan Pulsar). We didn’t just roll; we actually flipped over three times and landed in the grassy median now facing 80 East . I will say this, and this is true for all of my vehicular mishaps: I was completely sober. And, this happened at about 10 am in the morning on a clear day. Lucky for us we had on our seatbelts and were not seriously injured. The Winnebago ended up stopping, and after we collected ourselves in their bathroom, my boyfriend (at the time) went back to the wrecked car and saved the ounce of weed we stashed for the trip in the stereo speaker. The cops soon came and gave us (and the weed) a ride to the nearest hotel.

So, I got away from death AND the law, all in one day.

57

I have dial-up internet service and, of course, sometimes things load slowly. Especially pop-up ads that my filter doesn’t catch. I always feel like I’m getting away with something when one of those windows appears and I can close it before it gets a chance to start loading. I actually get this small triumphant feeling deep inside.

58

I outsmarted security at a high profile event. The auditorium had two elevators. One elevator was on the outside of the lobby (you needed tickets to get into the lobby and then into the main auditorium) and one elevator was on the inside of the lobby. Both elevators were on the oposite ends. I take the elevator that is on the outside of the lobby to the second floor then I take the other elevator back down to the first floor. When the elevator doors open, I am walk to the auditorium seating. Remember, the ushers were taking tickets at the lobby entrance and since I was in the lobby I could go right ahead and take an empty seat. But then I remembered that my friend was outside. We both ended up sitting near the front.

How did I do it. My friend and I went to the back of the overflow room and I was telling my friend, but also intentionally speaking loud enough so the PR guys could hear, my little exploit. They decided we both checked out and gave us two free passes.

59

More of a “lucked out” than “got away with”.

Doing a favor for my dad (picking up a rental car), I took off a Friday to take him to the rental agency. I had no idea where I was and was looking for the rental car place, and forgot that it was a Friday morning (and a school day). So, I’m zipping down a divided highway going 53 and completely missed the school zone 15 mph flashing signs.

I see the rental place and pull in. I never see the cop behind me, because I wasn’t looking for him. So we stop, and my dad and I get out of my car (big no-no. Always stay in the car when you are being pulled over!) The officer **FREAKS **out at me and starts screaming to not move, stay near the car, hands where he can see them. My dad and I look at each other like “is he talking to us?” Honestly, I had no idea I was being pulled over.

The classic. After the officer gets to me, my dad says “hey, I’ll be in the office getting the car.” Thanks, dad. Jackass! He leaves me with a cop who has by now turned purple with rage that we both got out of the car (apparently, that’s a very confrontational stance. I didn’t know I was being confrontational until he told me while he was spitting on me.) I explained to him as calmly as I could that I didn’t even know he was pulling me over and I would have never exited my car if I did. I was completely focused on finding that rental agency and never saw the lights in my rearview mirror. I also told him that I thought it was Saturday, in which case the school zone violation would not have been valid. But, it was Friday, and a brain fart doesn’t change that.

So, after about 15 minutes of the riot act, he takes my information and goes back to his car. Dear old dad comes walking out of the place with his keys to his rental car and asks what’s going on. I tell him I’m getting a ticket. He says “I’ll see you at home.” Thanks again, bonehead! (please let me be adopted.) Here I am, doing him a favor, and I’m about to get hammered. And he leaves me there. [Stan & Kyle] You Bastard! [/Stan &Kyle]

The cop finally comes back, and has calmed down. He realized that I had a clean driving record and probably realized that I wasn’t the danger to him or society that he might have thought. The problem was he had already called me in and wrote me up before he calmed down. So, I was looking at a $300+ fine, 7 points, suspension of license (for being over 30 mph over the speed limit PLUS being caught in a school zone. Double whammy.)

I’m in big trouble. And the cop knew it. He said to me, “look, you are going to lose your license. You need to fight this ticket, or you will not be able to drive after the hearing.”

So I contested the ticket and the cop never showed for court. After being read the riot act by the judge, I politely said thank you to the judge. Driving away, I also said a quick “thank you” to the cop (he never heard it, but I hope he knew it), who really cut me a huge break.

Still give my dad crap for that to this day. Thanks for the support, Dad! (what a butthead)

60

Back in the mid-80’s, when the optical technology for recognizing dollar bills was in its early stages, a guy I knew used to get money by duping the machines. Or, at least, that’s what he told me. He’d make photocopies of dollar bills, put the copies into the change machines, and get quarters. He said that, for a while, he would make up to $50 per week from various change machines. Apparently, the machines stopped accepting his bogus cash after a couple of years, but he never once got caught.