Wait long enough at any dinner party, and almost surely someone has a story like this. A tale from their past, usually involving ignoring the law and breaking a couple of rules, which they happily share with anyone who will listen. People with a "breaking the law" story from their youth and, most surprisingly, from old age feel a liberation to ignoring the status quo and living to tell the tale. Sometimes they're epic, sometimes they're a little smaller, as evidenced by the following stories.
Reddit user, u/StrangeDamage9, wanted to know about those times when braking the law was life-changing when they asked:
What is the most illegal thing you've done and gotten away with?
When You Absolutely Need To Play
Giphy
I used to technically break into my high school after hours just to play computer games. (Well before people had PC's at home.) I'd just unlock a window and then come back into the school later.
This is actually kind of impressive.
Fire Me, Will You?!
I stole my boss's car when he said I wasn't allowed to quit my job (we were based really far in the mountains and the only way to leave was with his vehicle... so thats what i did). I left the car a day later in a nearby town.
I need to know more. Why didn't he let you quit? What happened when you stole the car???
It was an equestrian centre in Bavaria. They exclusively hired extremely young foreign girls and took advantage of them. I worked illegal hours... getting up at 5am and finishing at 9pm with about 15 minutes rest. I was also promised at least 1 day off a week but it turned into 1 day off a month. There was no way off of this mountain, and it was January, so it was dangerous to walk anywhere. I told my boss I was done and wanted to go home, but he told me that I had to fulfil [sic] my 3 month contract. I tried calling a taxi in the night but they said they wouldn't send anyone up there.
One afternoon I decided f-ck it, and I waited until my boss and his wife was out in the paddock when I went into their house and stole their car key. They were parked facing a snow bank, and as I threw my bag in the back I remembered that the car doesn't reverse and you have to push it out. I couldn't do it by myself, so I just smashed through the snow bank instead. There was some scratches to the front. I drove over an hour to the nearest village and tried to hide the car as best I could before getting a b&b for the night with a fake name (OTT i know but i was 18 at the time and was on a dramatic high lol). Next day I drove the car to the nearest train station and left it there with the key behind one of the wheels...
Never know what happened to it. I got a text from my boss that day but I deleted it without reading because I was so scared about what it could say. Flew back home and never heard from them again.
When You Absolutely Need To Play Pokémon GO
Giphy
I once smuggled my smartphone into the military, kept it inside a book Andy Dufresne style, used it when I was alone and got away with it.
How did you charge it??
You're allowed to keep your power bank in your locker in my country's military, so every once in a while I took it to bed and charged it under the pillow.
To Be Fair, This Doesn't Seem Like Your Fault
I bought 2 sets of furniture one day. An end table and an dining room table set that was in 3 boxes. All of it was assembly required, all stacked up on a heavy duty cart, all from the same company. The cashier scanned the top item, an end table that was 50 bucks, and thought it was the whole cart of sh-t, worth 500 bucks.
I was poor and I accepted his mistake.
Sorry. i am bad.
That's how I got a free Nintendo switch, grabbed it with the full intent to buy it but when they didn't scan it I wasn't gunna say anything, did speed walk out of the store as fast as possible tho
What A True Mafioso...?
Serial Jaywalker right here. I do it EVERY SINGLE DAY. Try and stop me.
I'm making a Citizens Arrest. Right Now.
Target Better Be On The Lookout
Giphy
A friend of mine would compulsively steal from clothes stores all the time, she'd brag about how she could get away with anything and would put on jewelry and clothing and just walk out. Then one day she started working for the store and they had a binder full of faces pulled from CCTV who'd been caught and oh no, hers was in there. To her advantage she'd changed hair color and had lost quite a bit of weight so wasn't easily recognizable but I doubt it really taught her any real lesson.
We don't talk anymore.
Was it Target? Their LP does NOT eff around and will purposely let you get away with it at first just so they can start building a case and hit you with a whammy
So what you're saying is that you can steal one thing from every Target.
The giant flat-screen bandit has hit every Target on the east coast. But NEVER twice!
All Signs Point To: REBEL
I took a lot of street signs as a teen. It was dumb, but whatever. They are still stashed in the woods. I've considered returning them to somewhere where it can be picked up because I feel kinda sh-tty about it today.
The best is when you take it and you put it in your friends yard at night and they wake up and see a sign planted in their yard.
Who Wouldn't Need A New Door?
I once stole a guy's apartment door for a little while.
I want so much more information than that!
My friend and I saw that he'd had a new door delivered but it wasn't yet installed. We took it, leaned it up against a tree nearby, and invited people to the party at our new place. They came and it was a good time. It got cut short when the door's owner caught us, politely asked for his door back, and we returned it.
It's The Thought That Counts?
Giphy
The other day I was taking my shopping to the car with a trolly and I realized I hadn't scanned a packet of vegetable stock that was hidden underneath my bags. I felt too awkward to go back into the TESCO to explain the situation, so kept it. I'm so sorry Lairg TESCO, I owe you one!
Get your pitchforks ready there's a monster among us.
And The Winner? House. Stole A House.
We stole a house.
As young poor mountain hippies (way different from city hippies) unable to afford building materials, we came across a (seemingly) abandoned 2 story cabin in the woods. No furnishings or windows. So the three of us dismantled it board by board and salvaged the hand hewn beams and every scrap of lumber. Even found opiate elixirs antique bottles hidden in the walls under 1800's newspaper used for insulation. It took several weeks, many trips over the mountain, and much hard labor, but we considered it a recycling project.
On the last day, as we were securing the final load on my '47 Dodge flatbed truck', the property owner showed up and was angry and amazed at the same time. This was before cell phones and the nearest phone was miles away. We apologized, saying we thought it was abandoned, and left. He couldn't even prove that the house ever existed we left the site so clean.
No dude, the story can't end there. This man went home to his family and had to explain the cabin he bought to fix up was TAKEN away and that next years week long camping trip is canceled.
H/T: Reddit
Do You Even Lift, Bro?
Used to break into my high school to use the weight room :-D
Would just leave the lights off and lift in the dark!
Probably creeped the shit out of the custodian who would hear grunting and metallic noises coming from a dark room.
It's just the ghost of swoleness past.
Shots Fired
Giphy
I returned from an active war zone, by aircraft, and then taxi and public transport on the train, hitch hiking the last 2 miles. When I got back to my parent's house, I dumped all my dirty laundry and headed out to see my girlfriend right away.
When i got back my mother had put my smock in the wash, with a ton of ammunition in the pocket that I had not known I had in there.
That can get you in a lot of trouble, and it was a total accident. I decided the best place for it was at the bottom of a deep hole with a pond on top.
You Want A Pizza Me?
I once took the last slice of pizza at a birthday party.
I later realized I forgot to ask the buyer of said pizza before I snatched that delicious morsel away from anyone else's grasp.
I am ashamed.
That Escalated Quickly
When I was 16 I was making some very high quality fake IDs. But I was also participating in a site called ShadowCrew that focused on carding, identification etc. Well somehow I got access to the "Upper levels" VPN. But the site operator had been busted and the VPN was essentially just a monitoring device for the US Secret Service.
Eating dinner with my parents one night, I hear a smashing at the front door, look down the hall and see the door fly open with about 5 guys in kevlar with automatic weapons and then the back door flies in as well with "RCMP RCMP! GET ON THE FLOOR!". I was handcuffed in front of my parents and taken in for questioning with 2 USSS agents watching. I guess they thought I was a lot bigger than I actually was, they put me in a cell until 3am then let my dad come pick me up. I never heard another word from them again, no charges, no follow up. I was in the newspapers etc. You can read about the operation on Wikipedia it was called Operation Firewall. They arrested like 30 people around the world at the same time and a lot of people did time.
This is the excerpt from the news article describing me. They got the username wrong due to my info being sealed:
A 17-year-old Canadian went by the nics "Liquid Dust," "LIQ.dust," or simply "Dust," American authorities say. But this is impossible to corroborate through police and prosecutors in Canada; the teen's name cannot be published because of provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
A third teen was later also taken into custody.
Details of the crimes allegedly perpetrated by the Canadians remain sealed by court order, as prosecutors in that province continue to weigh what, if any, charges will be laid against them.
But what investigators in both countries allege is that the 17-year-old was the mastermind.
"He was unusual," says Johnson, "in that you typically don't get that high up in that hierarchy at that (young) age.
And one of its elite, police allege, was a 17-year-old youth, said by police to be the brains behind a Canadian document forgery and drugs operation that allegedly included two accomplices from the Lower Mainland.
Armed officers from the Vancouver Emergency Response Team, the local RCMP detachment and the Vancouver police arrested the youth at his Richmond home as he sat at the dinner table eating lasagna with his father, brother and a teenage friend on Oct. 26, 2004. His computer, switched on when officers arrived, was taken into evidence.
"We went in there and literally the fork just came out of the mouth," Det.-Const. Mark Fenton, a computer crime investigator with the Vancouver Police Department, says. "Then I had to sit down with the [17-year-old's] parents and explain why we were there because obviously [they] were dumbfounded, to say the least."
Goldilocks
Giphy
Finding a random suburban unlocked home in the middle of the night, sneaking into the house and emptying the liquor cabinet.
Pushing Your Luck
I used to steal Playstation 2 consoles. The Wal-Mart Supercenter by the place I was staying at, had sensors (specifically set to respond to the strips that were stickered onto each unit's box) that would trigger the alarm system by both of the sets of doors on each of grocery and general merchandise sides, but I noticed that the home and garden department had an exit after the registers that had no sensors, so I would put a PS2 in my cart, and some other things to make it look realistic, stroll out of the gardening department, and just kept doing it. After the tenth time or so, they installed sensors by the gardening doors.
So I started peeling off the stickers, so that I could still walk through said doors without triggering the alarms. Several consoles later, they implemented a policy of locking up the consoles, so I would ask an employee to get one of them out of the locked cases for me, and then I would repeat the process. Then, it became policy that once they console had been taken out of the locked cases, they were required to be checked out before leaving the electronics department. That is when I started stealing them from Best Buy, which turned out to be much easier. I would walk in with a legitimate but dated receipt for a PS2, pick one up, walk to the door, they would glance at said receipt, and let me walk out.
Several successful repeats later, I saw the difference in policy when they started reading the receipts much more carefully, so I would walk in with an empty PS2 Box, (making sure that it had the small metallic strip on it that would set of the alarm when coming in) get a pink sticker on it (this denotes that the merchandise came in for return or repair, so that it could be walked out with) then casually stroll over to the PS2s proudly on display, take the pink sticker off of my empty box, place said empty box in the display, and slap the sticker onto the new box, walk to the front, go through slowly so that the alarm would go off, brandish the sticker towards the employee at the front, so that I would be waved on out.
This all happened during the winter of 2000 and lasted until the fall of 2001 when I got a job, which changed my outlook drastically. I completely lost count of how many consoles I got away with. If I'm being boastful, I would say in the 70's, but honestly, it was prolly much closer to the fifties in quantity. I'm not proud of the choices, and to be frank, as much as it was for the money, there was a much more needy concept of feeling like I was outsmarting (for all intents and purposes) THE WORLD, but I know that I would just being a shitty person, and making life harder on good people that worked at the Wal-Mart locations, and the Best Buys that I preyed on.
- 10 Illegal Things We Do Every Day ›
- Fmr. Trump Org. exec.: Trump asked employees to do things that ... ›
- Rex Tillerson on Trump: 'Undisciplined, doesn't like to read' and tries ... ›
- 11 totally illegal things you've probably done at least once ›
- 20 Things You Think Are Illegal but Aren't ›
- You might get into trouble for doing these 7 illegal things in your ... ›
- 7 Things That Are Illegal in Europe | AFAR ›
- 22 bizarre things you didn't know were banned or illegal around the ... ›
- Ten Illegal Things To Do In London - YouTube ›
- 30 Illegal Things Practically Everyone Has Done | Best Life ›
The old wives' tales.
They are the stories of legend.
I think we all need a big DEEP Google dive though.
Where did they originate?
WHO ARE THE OLD WIVES!
You don't hear about them as much anymore.
It's like science and logic are suddenly a thing.
But they sure are a good way to keep your kids and their behavior in line.
Redditor the_spring_goddess wanted to discuss the tall tales we've all been fed through life, so they asked:
"What is an old wives tale that people still believe?"
"Wait an hour to swim after eating."
What a crock!
So many summer hours wasted.
I want revenge for that one.
Say Nothing
Giphy
"An undercover cop has to tell you he's a cop if you ask him."
LonelyMail5115
"Pretty much most advice when it comes to cops are old wives tales. I’m not even a cop but most of the advice you hear is pretty off."
I_AM_AN_A**HOLE_AMA
Say Something
"That you have to wait 24 hours to report someone missing."
Severe_Airport1426
"I really think this one is important and should be the top regardless. As it’s a piece of advice that needs to be relearned and the only way to do that is through awareness."
crappycurtains
"This used to be true. I think they changed it after some guy named Brandon went missing back in the '80s or '70s. You used to have to wait 24 hours if the missing person was an adult because they had 'a right to be missing' and then everyone realized that was stupid and stopped doing it."
AlbinoShavedGorilla
Body Temps
"That drinking ice cold water after eating oily foods will solidify the oil and permanently remain in your body. I informed my coworker that if your body temperature ever reached that point, you’d have bigger problems than weight gain."
chriseo22
"Oh, I have a cousin who 100% believed this. One of those guys who believed every early 2000s internet rumor and old wives tale. One night I chugged a big glass of ice water after dinner and he started freaking out and saying my guts were gonna harden."
"I sarcastically told him to drive me to the hospital if that happened. Obviously, nothing happened and the next morning I said something like 'Thanks for being on standby in case my guts filled with hardened oil.' He just walked off muttering under his breath."
apocalypticradish
Arms Down
"When I was pregnant, I was told by young and old alike that I should NOT raise my arms above my head or exert myself in such a manner because it could cause cord strangulation to my unborn sons and daughters."
Fatmouse84
10 Years Actually
Unimpressed Uh Huh GIF by Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Giphy
"Chewing gum stays in your stomach for 7 years."
"I remember accidentally swallowing a piece of gum when I was a kid in like 1995 and just accepting my fate like welp, gonna have this in my stomach til high school I guess."
Gecko-911
I was so afraid to sallow my gum when I was young.
This tale is haunting.
High/Low
Hungry Debra Messing GIF by Will & Grace
Giphy
"You can tell the sex of the baby by how you carry."
LeastFormal9366
"Pregnancy certainly wins awards for the most old wives tales. So much absolute BS was repeated to us by everyone we talked to."
IllIIIlIllIlIIlIllI
The Cursed
"If you’re a woman and you wear opal jewelry but opal is not your birthstone (October), you’ll never be able to have children, or will be widowed, or just generally have bad luck or something. You can counteract this by having a diamond in the same piece of jewelry as the opal, though."
"I have a nice opal ring that my parents gave me years ago, and I’ve had other women give me this 'advice' unprompted more than once when I’ve worn it. I have absolutely no idea where it started, but I’m pretty sure this little chunk of silicate rock has no concept of what month I was born in, let alone of how my reproductive organs work."
SmoreOfBabylon
Stay In
"Going outside with wet hair will make you get pneumonia. Or an earache. Or maybe arthritis. Depends on which old wife you listen to."
"Jokes on them - I haven't blow-dried my hair in decades and usually leave the house with wet hair in the morning. On winter mornings, the tips of my hair get frozen. No ear infections or pneumonia or arthritis yet."
worldbound0514
Dreams and Facts
"You never make anyone up in your dreams you've seen everyone in your dreams somewhere else before and never make anyone up entirely."
"How would you possibly prove that to be true? My partner adamantly believes this and tells me this 'fact' whenever I have a dream about someone I've never met before."
mattshonestreddit
"My late wife used to tell me that before she met me she would have dreams of standing at an alter on her wedding day but could never see the guy's face, no matter how hard she tried. After meeting me the face was filled in with mine. Don't know if it's true but one of those things I like thinking of every now and then when I miss her."
Darthdemented
Cracked
Getting Ready Episode 2 GIF by The Office
Giphy
"Some people still believe cracking knuckles causes arthritis."
Choice-Grapefruit-44
"There's a doctor (Donald Unger) that cracked his knuckles a couple of times a day for 60 years, but only on one hand, just to prove it. Both hands remained exactly the same."
MacyTmcterry
I love my knuckles.
Do you have any tall tales to add to the list? Let us know in the comments below.
