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
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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
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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
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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?
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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
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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
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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.
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For many childhood memories are overrun by living nightmares.
Yes, children are resilient, but that doesn't mean that the things we see as babes don't follow us forever.
The horrors of the world are no stranger to the young.
Redditor -2sweetcaramel- wanted to see who was willing to share about the worst things we've seen as kids, so they asked:
"What’s the creepiest thing you saw as a kid?"
Serious Danger
"Me and my best friend would explore the drainage tunnels under the Vegas area where we grew up. These were miles long and it was always really cool down there so it was a good way to escape the heat of our scorching hot summers. We went into this one that goes under the Fiesta casino and found a camp with a bunch of homeless people."
"Mind you we are like 11 years old lol. And we just kept going like it was nothing. It wasn’t scary then but when I look back at it we could have been in some serious danger. Our parents had no idea we did this or where we were and we had no cellphones. We could have been kidnapped and never have been found."
oofboof2020
Waiting for Food
"I was at a portillos once when I was 12 and I was waiting with my little brother at a booth while my parents got our food. This guy was standing with his tray kind of watching me then after a couple of minutes he started to walk over really fast not breaking eye contact with me."
"He was 2 feet from the table and my dad came out of nowhere and scared the s**t out of him. He looked so surprised and just said he wanted to see if I’d get scared or not. He left his tray full of food near the door and left. My folks reported him but we never went to that location again since we found a better one closer to home."
nowhereboy1964
Captain Hobo to the Rescue
"When I was a pretty young teen, my friends and I were horsing around in San Francisco and started hanging out to smoke with some homeless guys. Another homeless dude came up and began aggressively trying to shake us down for anything (money, smokes, a ride, drugs- all of it) and wouldn’t take no for an answer."
"We got in over our heads and could tell this guy was now riling the other 2 guys up and they were acting like they wanted to jump us. Some grandfather-looking old homeless man appeared out of nowhere and yelled at us to get the f**k out of here- nice kids like us don’t belong down here at this hour!!"
"Captain Hobo saved our lives that night. My parents sincerely thought we were at a mall all day lol."
FartAttack911
Survival
tsunami GIF
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"I was 7 and survived the 2004 tsunami in Thailand. Witnessed the wave rise way above the already massive palm trees (approx. 40ft?) and my family and I watched/heard the wave crash into the ground from a rooftop."
faithfulpoo
These Tsunami stories are just tragic.
On the Sand
Scared The Launch GIF by CTV
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"We were a group of kids who went to swim in a local lake. And there was a dead body on the beach with their hands raised and their legs bent unnaturally that local police just took out of the same lake. I've never put my foot in these waters again."
oyloff
Be Clever
"I was walking to school and I was about 5 or 6 years old and some guy pulled up beside me in his car and asked if I would get in. He also offered me sweets to do so. I said no. The creepy bit was when he calmly said ‘clever boy’ to me, then drove off. I’ve never even told my parents or anyone else about this as it would most likely freak them out."
OstneyPiz
Bad Jokes
"Dad's side of the family pranked me by burying a fake body on our back property and had me dig it up to find valuables. Was only allowed to use a lantern for light. They stuffed old clothes with chicken bones. Sheetrock mud where the head was... Random fake jewelry as the treasures... I was like maybe 10 or 11.. I remember digging up the boot first and started gagging because it became real at that point."
Alegan239
YOU
Who Are You Reaction GIF by MOODMAN
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"Woke up to find my little brother staring at me in the dark, asking, Are you really you?"
PrettyLola2004
Siblings can really be a bunch of creepers.
No one should talk to others in the dark though.
Not all pet owners have the same relationship with their pets.
While anyone who decides to become a pet owner, or pet parent as some say, love their pets equally, some never ever let them leave their side.
Taking their pet with them to work, running errands, even on vacations.
Many pet parents even allow their pets to share their bed with them when going to sleep.
For others though, this is where a line is finally drawn.
Redditor Piggythelavasurfer was curious to hear whether pet owners allowed their pets to share their bed with them, as well as the reasons why they do/don't, leading them to ask:
"Do you let your pet sleep in your bed? Why/why not?"
The Tiny Issue Of Water...
"Absolutely not."
"I have fish."- Senior-Meal3649
Everyone Gets Lonely Eventually...
"I adopted an eleven year old cat the day before Halloween."
"She has mostly lived in my closet since I got her, and she hasn’t been too interested in coming out."
"Last night, she came out of my closet and jumped up on my bed, and crawled under my covers and curled up by my feet to sleep."
"I was so happy!"- YellowBeastJeep
The Comforting Reminder That You're Not Alone...
"I recently lost my Greyhound but I used to let him sleep on my bed with me."
"The company was nice and he was no trouble to have on my bed."- HoodedMenace3
Hungry Cookie GIF by De Graafschap Dierenartsen
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What Do You Mean Allow?
"I have no choice."
"She is a cat, cats do whatever they want."- Small_cat1412
"He lets me sleep in my bed."- Poorly-Drawn-Beagle
Wouldn't Have It Any Other Way
"I carry my old boy upstairs to bed every night."- worst_in_show
Hug GIF by The BarkPost
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Who Needs An Alarm Clock?
"I let my two cats sleep with me."
"They're so full of love and just want cuddles all the time."
"And so do I."
"We've all developed a lil routine."
"Get to bed, oldest sleeps on my feet to keep them warm, youngest lies in my arm while I lie on my side (she the little spoon), then when I snooze my alarm for work in the morning the youngest paws at my face and meeps loudly to wake me up."- GhostofaFlea_
Whose Bed Is It Anyway?
"Yes."
"They're also kind enough to let me squeeze into whatever space they've left for me."
"Although I do get a few dirty looks off them."- Therealkaylor
"I found this tiny kitten screaming her head off under a car."
"Would not come out."
"Got some food and some water in dishes."
"I stood by the tire so she couldn't see my feet."
"She got curious about the food and water and started gobbling it down."
"I thought she would bolt when I squatted down."
"She was too busy eating."
"I grabbed her by the nape of the neck and all four legs went straight out and she tried to scratch me to death."
"I got her in the door and tossed her toward the couch."
"She ricocheted off the couch as if she was a ping pong off a table and I lost sight of her."
"I put out food and water and a sandbox and did not see that kitten for three days."
"On the third day, I came home and she was on my bed pillow."
"I thought she would bolt when I came near, but she didn't."
"I wanted to sleep so I tried to scoot her little butt off my pillow."
"She would not go."
"I put my head down to sleep and that is the way it was from then on."
"She ran the roost."- Logical_Cherry_7588
sleepy kitten GIF
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Sleeping Is A Prerequisite...
"No, he's a cat and he cannot keep still during the night."
"He walks across the headboard, opens the closet doors, jumps into the windows and rustles the blinds, etc."
"If he would sleep he could stay, but alas, he's a ramblin' man."- Spong_Durnflungle
Saying No Just Isn't An Option...
"'Let'."
"Lol."
"It's a cat's world and I'm happy to be on her good side."- milaren
Felines Only!
"The cat does, the dog doesn't and the horse certainly does not either."- Xcrowzz
Angry Tom And Jerry GIF by Boomerang Official
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Is That My Hair On That Pillow?
"My dog is perfect."
"She comes up, cuddles til we start to fall asleep, then gets down to sleep on her bed so she doesn't get too hot."
"Jumps back up in the early morning for wake up cuddles."
"The hair everywhere is the only downside but she is so cozy, what can you do."- HoodieWinchester
It is easy to understand how some people are able to fall asleep more easily knowing their friend and protector is there, in bed, with them.
Though we can't blame others who don't want to run the risk of being scratched or bitten in the middle of the night either...