My grandmother lived close to the high school out in rural west Texas. Her next door neighbor had a barb wire seguero cactus in the front yard. One night, some of the kids came by and roped it from the back of a pickup bed. Pulled it about halfway out before my granddad chased them off. Next week, they tried again. Only thing was, Mrs. Pearce didn’t think it was nice of them to steal her cactus so she’d had her son in law come and set the thing in cement. Which is why the young roper fairly flew out of the back end of the pickup. Everyone was lucky he didn’t hit his head on the sidewalk.
Same town, different grandmother. She woke up one morning to find all of her poppies had been uprooted. Same thing with her fellow gardening neighbors. We figure someone got very sick trying to extract opium from a whole lot of the wrong kind of poppy.
Somebody stole the wall-mounted soap dispenser from the men’s room at the local senior center. Twice. The manager started putting in pump dispensers that sit on the counter. Stolen. I think they finally went to bar soap.
Every once in a while I see a news story where somebody has stolen a cremains urn from someone’s home. Weird. I’m assuming they don’t know what they’ve taken.
Recently, a man stole a doughnut delivery truck. When they pulled him over, he had a doughnut in his hand and there was a half-empty box next to him.
Probably not truly theft. That trick was a standard office prank. A similar but more destructive prank is to epoxy the receiver down onto the instrument. It rings, the boss grabs it agressively, and clunks himself in the head with a phone. Hilarity ensues.
Back in high school some guys I knew “borrowed” a fiberglass cow that usually sat on the roof of a local burger joint. It turned up in several unexpected places after that.
Small, mean, and vile: someone stole a pair of my aunt’s eyeglasses. She left them on a counter at a movie theater, and someone took them. Why? What good would they be?
One Nike batting glove. Not the matching one, which was right next to it. Just the one glove, which belonged to my younger brother, which at the time meant it was the correct size for a 7-year-old child. The thieves broke into my mother’s car in downtown DC (hardly an uncommon occurrence) and stole half a pair of gloves.
They also stole a box of 1950s comedy cassette tapes out of a plastic bin under the seat and left a Gameboy Color and a Discman that were in the same bin. Very confusing robbery.
Sebago boat shoes, sized for an 8 year old girl. I had left them in my dad’s Jeep Wrangler while went out on the boat. They also stole our fishing gear, which made more sense. What do they want with kid’s shoes?
When I was a kid, we returned from vacation to find that our garage had been broken into. All of my dad’s shop equipment was in there, worth thousands of dollars but the only things missing wer the ducks from the chest freezer.
In my sister’s old apartment, she had a small front yard outside of her townhouse where she would grill out in the summer. One evening, we were in the living room enjoying a pre dinner cocktail while the chicken was cooking outdoors. When she went out to check on it, the chicken and the hot charcoalgrill were gone.
Geeze! People are almost as weird as cats! What do plant thieves say when people compliment them on their gardens? "Oh, thanks. I got those out of a garden on the other side of town. And how could any normal person enjoy looking at stolen plants? I’ve heard about people how spray paint their pine trees strange colors in December so they won’t get cut down and stolen. “Hey, kids… just cut this for you.”
(Now I will confess to stealing plant cuttings from a botanical garden, but I didn’t damage the plant…and only took one from each plant so I wouldn’t shock the plants. That was a very long time ago and I wouldn’t do it again.)
My dad tells the story of a time he was working in a small country town (in outback Queensland I think) and the local drunk went on an epic bender and stole a nearly full ‘night soil’ truck. :eek:
He rolled it going across the bridge leading out of town, spilling the contents and cutting the road in one direction until the offender was made to clean it up under the watchful (if distant) eye of the local cop.
I do have to confess that I spent a lot of time checking this thread on my phone at work. I laughed so very hard at times. Thanks so much for all the answers.
