I had a college professor who explained why all the teacher had to bring erasers into the classrooms. One year someone had stolen every eraser on campus. Shortly after the erasers were replaced, the thief struck again, so they had to issue them directly to professors to carry around.
They found out later the thief was carrying them back to his dorm room to build himself a carpet.
Gnome Severson.
In college I had a “pocket terminator” given as a gift. You pushed a button and it made machine gun or laser sounds. Fun in traffic. Never really realized how much it looked like a radar detector until I came out one morning to find the drivers side window smashed and the terminator gone, leaving a set of tickets for Rush in the glove box and an Anschutz .22 calibre rifle in the trunk.
On my lunch breaks from my job as a delivery driver, I try to go swimming at a pool in my area. I came back from my swim one day to find the lock missing from my locker and MY FREAKING PANTS gone. That’s all that was missing. I found them in another locker, (fortunately) and am guessing it was kids just looking for cash or cellphones. I left my wallet in my truck and had no cell. Still, THEY STOLE MY PANTS, MAN!!!
On two separate occasions I came back to my motorcycle to find that someone had drained about 3/4’s of my tank of gas. Fortunately, it was an old bike and the tank used a pet-cock that would draw fuel from one side of the tank or the other. (It’s divided in the middle by the portion of the tank that straddles the motorcycle frame.) I still got home, and I really wouldn’t have minded giving the gasoline away. The irritating part was that the thief didn’t bother to re-attach the fuel line to the petcock.
I still remember reading these in a magazine way back in the 1980’s:
One evening, an elderly lady walked into a police station in New York City and said, “I think I have to report a crime.”
Apparently she had been out walking in Central Park when someone did a snatch-and-run, ripping the white bag out of her hand.
But it wasn’t her purse; her purse was on the other arm, hanging off her elbow.
See, she been walking her toy poodle and was trying to be an upright citizen…
A college student was stopped on the street at night by a man who waved a knife at her and demanded, “Give me all your money!”
“I don’t have any cash.” the girl shook her head, then offered, “But I could write you a check. There’s a couple thousand dollars in my account.”
The robber agreed, so she got her checkbook out and started writing, then stopped and looked at him, “Who should I make it out to?”
“Steven Mark-Harthen” the brilliant robber replied.
“Okay,” she agreed and finished writing the check. She handed it to him and said, “You’ll have to cash it at my bank tomorrow morning. The address is in the lower left corner.”
Police waited at the bank for Steven to cash the check.
–G!
A friend who works wool and yarn shows, where they sell handspun and hand dyed wool, told me thefts of the wool and yarn are common. I was astounded at the idea of a bunch of thieving knitters.
One of my patients told me her home health aide had stolen a 12 pack of Cokes. I was skeptical, I mean a case is $3, right? why would somebody steal that? turned out to be true, and the aide was fired and prosecuted* but I still don’t get it.
Back in high school, I was riding in a friends car and made a little monster-guy out of blue sticky-tack. He was about as well sculpted as you’re going to sculpt something out of sticky-tack, using only your fingers, fingernails and a straight pin. The pin was the sort with a colored sphere at the end and he was holding it aloft like a scepter. He was placed on the friend’s dashboard.
Two days later we came out of a mall and, you guessed it, someone had stolen him. The car was unlocked but the windows were up so someone had to try the doors and enter the car to get him. Someone with a very curious understanding of “risk versus reward”.
In Queensland cane toads are a pest and very common. They’re horrible looking things and quite poisonous.
The toads are used by a local university for experiments and dissection and so on. When I was in my teens, I had a connection through a friend to someone who worked at the university and who could organise for us to get paid for toads we collected. I think the going rate was $0.20 a toad or $0.50 in winter when it was cooler and harder to find them. Which was pretty good money if the hunting was good.
Anyway, most of the university’s toads didn’t come from a couple of teenagers. Most of the toads used by the university came from tropical Northern Queensland where they are even more common. They were collected (or bred?) by professionals and then railed down in crates of several thousand toads to the university. But the university had a problem which is that the crates were getting tossed around, turned upside down etc and the toads were arriving in poor condition. Some genius decided to see if they could remedy this by putting “HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE: OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS” on the side of the crates. Optical instruments sound pretty valuable, right?
So in the context of this thread, I don’t need to tell you what happened next. I can’t imagine the faces of the thieves when they broke open the crates.
Someone stole a garden hose from my front yard. I’ve also had about 3 gas cans stolen from the carport.
This is actually what prompted this thread. I’m going to be a bag check lady so people can’t carry bags into a stitching show. I was pretty :smack: about it too.
I once had a friend who’s husband made a Christmas wreath with coat hangers and colored duct tape. It was an object of duct tape art and very valued to her. She had her husband wire it to the front of her truck and showed it off to everyone…until the day she left work and saw that…yeah…some jerk had stolen it.
I am so cracking up over this! Thanks so much for sharing, I know I’m not the only one laughing right now!
Geeze, some people are real jerks. But at least some of them get their due right away.
We planted a row of small rosemary bushes alongside our house, in strip of earth just a few centimetres wide between the house and the edge of the concrete footpath. Maybe 20 of these plants, each only a handspan tall at most. They cost $1-$2 each.
Over the next few months, 2 or 3 at a time disappeared until there were none left at all.
A friends house was robbed.
They stole her husbands false teeth.
around here the plant thieves win awards. A few years back some of my newly planted seedlings started to go missing wich sucked because I did not have money to burn. Anyways long story shorter… maybe… A about the same time a nice little old lady started stopping by to compliment me on my garden etc. She was a pensioner and did not have a lot of money either so I gave her lots of cuttings, wire etc :smack: About a month later I was home at an unusual time when I spotted granny pulling out one of my smaller flower bushes by the roots. I ran out and yelled an she dropped the plant and fled (it survived and is still blooming). A few weeks later she was in the local paper being handed an award for her garden :smack: So she cased me, stole from me and got an award for her efforts. I later discovered she stole from just about everyone in a 3 block radius.
Strange because it is free and it was obvious who stole it: I live in a flat. I had a “no junk mail” sticker on my letterbox, provided free by some online source. Had it there for months. My daughter had drawn on it at a time when she would draw on everything.
One day I came home, went to open the door, and the sticker wasn’t there. Weird. Next day as I left I happened to glance over at my neighbour’s door and my sticker was on her letterbox, drawing and everything. Just really bloody weird.
Well, there was the episode of the twelve-mile rail line from Birr to Portumna Bridge, in the midlands of Ireland – famous thereabouts for well over a century, as the “Stolen Railway”. This section, westward from the existing railhead at Birr to the east bank of the River Shannon, was opened for passenger and freight traffic in 1868. Running through thinly-populated country, it proved to be little used and very unprofitable: the operating company suspended all train services over it ten years later. The line lay derelict from then on, while interested parties debated over its future; in the event, trains never ran on it again. Initially, caretakers were posted to keep the line intact; but after a few years, with no decision taken as to its likely fate and seemingly no likelihood of anything being decided, their services were dispensed with.
From then on, the local people surreptitiously removed bit by bit, all the line’s rails and attendant ironwork; the sleepers (ties) and track ballast; and virtually the whole of the terminal station at Portumna Bridge, and various lesser intermediate buildings – everything was used by the locals, to construct or shore up buildings and other facilities. With those potentially interested as proprietors or operators having, as it were, abandoned the line to its fate; no action was ever taken against the local folk, for their wholesale looting. However, the topic remains a slightly embarrassing and unwelcome one for people in that part of the country, even today.
“There’s nothing new under the sun”; I understand that large-scale theft of rails and sometimes more, from rail lines which are lightly used or “dormant”, is quite a scourge in the more chaos-prone parts of the world at the present day. Nowadays, though, people tend to do this in order to sell their plunder to unscrupulous scrap-metal merchants.
A friend of mine had her house broken into just last night. As she came home the theives dropped what they had and ran out the back door. It looks like they were trying to steal some jewelry and her dog’s ashes. I don’t think they got away with anything just due to lucky timing on my friend’s part arriving home.
I remember reading that at the height of Sylvester Stallone’s career in the late 80s while he was living with Brigitte Nielsen he had a life-size sculpture of the two of them in the nude on one of his estates, and someone sneaked in and broke off and stole the (his) penis! Ew…
A few years before stealing gnomes and taking pictures of them in strange places became popular, someone stole the Tiki statue from a Tiki restaurant and did the same thing.
My personal favorite has to be the News of the Weird article about somebody stealing a pond from a public park.
Somebody stole the elk statue from in front of a local Elks club.
When I lived in a dorm with a common kitchen food theft was common. I switched from chocolate pudding to yogurt because apparently the thief didn’t like it (it was new then). I was a Heinlein fan then, but not having access to PodKayne of Mars type dyes I laced one of the puddings with Exlax…
I remember an old news story about the fiberglass Big Boy statue turning up missing from a Big Boy restaurant in Vermont. It was found several days later, in the woods, with a couple of bullet holes in its head.
When I was a kid in the 1970s, someone in our area was stealing the neighborhood watch signs off of every block. I think it was a perverse thrill for whoever was doing it.
Similarly, when I was at UCLA, there was a rash of car alarm thefts occurring in the parking structures, which were supposedly being resold on the black market. Who would knowingly buy a hot car alarm? Kinda proves it’s a waste of money.