Weirdest thefts?

[Mistress of Foxes]

A shrubbery.

Maybe they stole a herring to cut down the tallest tree with, too?

at least I think that's how it goes...

[protege]

Maybe they stole a herring to cut down the tallest tree with, too? [/S]

Actually, they stole another shrubbery, placed it next to the first shrubbery, but slightly higher for a two-level effect with a little path running down the middle

[Imogene]

Okay, reading through this thread suddenly reminded me of my brother and his friends. I forget whom, but one of them stole one of those "Next Register, Please" signs from a BlockBuster, and it eventually ended up my brother's property (I think it was a gift...)
The time they really got in trouble, though, all four of them had decided to move what they thought was a friend's car from one end of the parking lot at a school board meeting, to the other, without taking off the parking break, much less turning on the car. That's right, four of them, working against inertia and a locked car... Turns out, it wasn't their friend's car. Oooh, they got in deep with that stunt.

[hotelslave]

Weird things stolen

From Hotel:

1) Had a guest steal the blankets, sheets, pillows, towels, ash trays and light bulbs from a room and some how managed to get it past the front desk. Then called back and asked for his refund for the deposit he put down for movies.
2) Some one stole an entire basket of stale store bought cookies.
3) Basket of apples

From Kinko's:

1) The cheap picture hanging in bathroom.

[repsac]

Hmm. From my college days (most of them)

I'm not sure if you'd call it stealing, but I did take the "Dean's only" parking sign. I say I'm not sure since he gave me the screwdriver to do it and said have at it. (they had just fired him.)

Sixteen boxes of paper. Indirectly. I pressed the wrong button. The computer printed for three days straight.

Light Bar off the Campus security car, while the campus cop was in it. (Scavenger hunt. We later gave it back.)

A human skull.

Fifty pounds of clay. (I didn't mean to take that one. The prof had me moving stuff around in my truck and I forgot the clay I had slid under the truck cab. By the time I found it, the stuff was a brick. A very heavy brick.)



I've still got that skull floating around somewhere. I forget all the details of it, but I seem to remember the professor saying that if I could get it out of the building without being seen, I could have it.

[Ree]

Sixteen boxes of paper. Indirectly. I pressed the wrong button. The computer printed for three days straight.

Couldn't you simply have turned off the power? Was there no kill switch?

After the first box of paper ran out, who were the 15 other people who kept refilling it over those 3 days? Seems like a pretty useless exercise when going in and typing a command to shut down the printer might have been more effective.

[Hemily]

someone stole the sign saying "Toilets ->" at a local community house...

[RecoveringKinkoid]

"Light Bar off the Campus security car, while the campus cop was in it. (Scavenger hunt. We later gave it back.)"

Now THIS, brothers and sisters of the congregation, is ballsy.

[protege]

I'm not sure if you'd call it stealing, but I did take the "Dean's only" parking sign. I say I'm not sure since he gave me the screwdriver to do it and said have at it. (they had just fired him.)

Sounds like what the college museum curator and I did shortly after graduation. The school had just built a new student center and had moved the snack bar, lounge, bookstore, and mail room over there. As such, the original building (which is still used as a cafeteria) had those areas blocked off.

That summer, I was working in the computer department labs as an assistant. Gotta love summer school. Anyway, I went up to the museum during lunch, and ran into the curator. I'd done volunteer work for him for years, and got to go some places were students weren't allowed--the area under the lecture hall, various hidden places in the administration building, the attic in the business hall, etc. Plus, he'd occasionally give me freebies--old buttons, pins, etc.

That day, he was given all of the bookstore's old fixtures, and was moving them into the museum. He actually asked me if I'd like to do a little "breaking and entering." Keep in mind that the college president was standing there, and was like

So we went in there, and literally cleared the place out--shelves, signs, everything. Some of those things were "donated" to my own workshop, including several of the signs and the calling-card mobile-thingie. It's still hanging from my basement ceiling.

[CrazedClerk]

My friend's brother has an ever growing collection of road signs in his basement: Stop, Yield, Men at Work, One Way, Do Not Enter, No Parking.

Last I heard he wanted to steal some town signs from the sides of roads (you know when you enter a town and there's a sign that says "Town X", he wants to take some of those.)

Awhile back there was a popular song here which shared it's name with the name of a small town in this province. Not after the song came out, the town experienced an epidemic of missing name signs.

[Banrion]

Couldn't you simply have turned off the power? Was there no kill switch?

After the first box of paper ran out, who were the 15 other people who kept refilling it over those 3 days? Seems like a pretty useless exercise when going in and typing a command to shut down the printer might have been more effective.

It's not always possible. Here at work, if I run a report from the mainframe to my local printer, NOTHING can stop it. Even turning off the printer and disconnecting it from the network won't kill the report request. The server will just wait for the printer to come back online. I had my printer here go down for a week, and once it came back up it took over 8 hours to print all the reports that were queued up and waiting. The reports don't show up in Print Manager, so you can't cancel them from there either.

[MadMike]

My friend's brother has an ever growing collection of road signs in his basement: Stop, Yield, Men at Work, One Way, Do Not Enter, No Parking.

A buddy of mine used to live on 69th Street. When I'd go to visit him, I'd almost always end up driving right past his street because the damn sign was always missing.

One day I met the guy who had been taking the signs. He had a whole collection of them stashed under his bed. He bragged about how every time they'd put another one up, he'd take that one too.

I didn't know whether to laugh or kick his ass. Maybe kick his ass while laughing maniacally.

[Cia]

The street that runs behind where I work is called Sum Place. The city can't keep the sign up. Not far away is a little street called Kno Place. It's real fun when somebody comes in and sheepishly asks where they can find Sum Place or Kno Place.

[BookstoreEscapee]

Okay, reading through this thread suddenly reminded me of my brother and his friends. I forget whom, but one of them stole one of those "Next Register, Please" signs from a BlockBuster, and it eventually ended up my brother's property (I think it was a gift...)

Gee, what a ...um, thoughtful...gift

[Bagga]

Decades ago, when I worked at Dixon's, a photo chain, we once prepared a display of standard 8 cine projectors. To put the Sigma sound projector in pride of place , at the back of the display, we removed 100s of boxes of 35mil film from the metre-deep waist-high shelf in front of the display niche, put the Sigma right at the back, about a metre back and at eye level, put 4 lesser cine projectors in front of it, stepped off the counter, and replaced all the 35 mil film....

So, the Sigma weighs about 20 kilos, is at eye level, in a 1 and a half metre cube-shaped recess, about 2 metres away from you, if you stand against the film shelf...

Someone stole it 3 days later, while we were open, and without changing any of the rest of the display. I still cant figure out how.

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The funniest thing I ever stole was a bus stop. The bus had been re-routed due to road works, so a temporary bus stop was placed in the road that ran parallel. A little metal pole stuck into a very heavy concrete cylinder, with the numbers of the the busses that stopped there painted on a little square at the top of the pole.

So we carried it along the bus route, and place it about 2 bus lengths from the next stop. And people queued at both stops, for the same buses.