Minor crimes

[RedRooster]

In a moment of utter brain fartery, my auntie ate a loose grape while doing her shopping in Tesco. I would have been 7 or 8 at the time, and I was with her. 

She realised the did that immediately, and told the person at the till, who said it was fine and not worth worrying about. She then went to customer services, who said it was fine. So she asked to speak to the manager, who wasn't there. It was a bit mortifying. 

But it got worse. She decided she wanted to buy a single grape, and immediately return it. Or rather, she decided she wanted someone to buy a single grape and immediately return it. No prizes for guessing who. 

I was too young to feel like I could say no, so she waited at the entrance for me as if she were an escape vehicle and this was a bank heist. 

I felt physically sick at the prospect of doing this - and picked up a Mars bar so it looked less stupid. The girl at the checkout scanned the mars bar, picked up the grape and cast it aside without saying a word to me. She obviously hadn't noticed me place it on the conveyer belt. I bought the Mars bar, I didn't buy the grape.

I then pretended I'd returned it, and left with my auntie, telling her I'd done exactly as she'd asked. 

So auntie, if you're reading this, you're responsible for two grapes vanishing from the books of Presto supermarket. 

[JLM]

 

[waters44]

Not me but a friend told me this a while back. 

Back in the early 00’s him and a mate were groundworkers and used to go “dumping”. Apparently you could start a particular type of those dumper truck things with a 50p coin, so they’d go out in the middle of the night on building sites / roadworks etc, nick the dumpers and park them on a driveway nearby or supermarket car parks. Once they even left one in the middle of a roundabout 

[WeeAl]

23 hours ago, waters44 said:

I was a dad at 18 so missed those partying years other teenagers enjoy.

I'm confused. Why have we lost Dad's in the forum name cleanse, yet you haven't gained the name? I'm starting a petition. The44thDad?

[Sergio Mendacious]

I can never go back to Bruges, as I stole an aniseed ball from a sweet shop, and I've seen Les Mis.

[Mr_Danger]

You fools are going to be raided by Teedy Kay and the boys in the morning. 

[Frankie Crisp]

I had a couple of dalliances with the bizzies in my late teens/early twenties.

One was when I was with my first serious girlfriend, when we were having a night out with her mates in the local boozer. She had a male mate who’d come out a few months earlier and we chatted for ages about how brave he was - this was 2000 so it wasn’t as acceptable to many in society as now. He was about 18 so I thought the world of him for his decision, which turned a lot of his college mates against him.

Prior to this night out, my then girlfriend told me she’d been out bra shopping and this kid and he’d been telling her which were and weren’t making her tits look good. I wasn’t arsed about that, but fast forward to this night out and one of her mates overhead him saying he wasn’t gay, but was using that as a line to get near to girls. I flipped.

At that age, I wasn’t a big fat get like I am now and a set of scales would have barely recognised me. But this lad was smaller! As we were outside, my ridiculously insecure masculinity convinced me to handle him. I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and put him up against the Kwik Save window. The intention was just to scare him. The window shattered. I didn’t have any strength but I’m convinced they went out of business because they scrimped on glazing.

Anyway, we legged it. Everyone just scattered and we all lost contact. I rang and rang and rang my girlfriend’s phone and she kept buttoning me. This was when you had a PAYG phone and it cost an extra 20p to go over the character limit on text messages, so my pleas asking her to forgive and contact me were fucked.

There was no way I was knocking on at her house. Her Dad was a bizzie and an awful prick, but one of her mates messaged me and said they’d gone to hers. I walked up, thinking I was going to have a big cuddle and cry and heart-to-heart, but instead I got there and the coppers were waiting. Setup.

I got put in the car, was taken to the local station and got the full treatment. They took the laces out of my trainers so I didn’t hang myself. After the biggest bollocking you could imagine, they let me go but I had to agree to meet their colleagues at the Kwikkie the next morning to apologise and agree to pay for the damage. As a temp on a shit wage, I spent the next three years funding a new window in a shit supermarket. 

The other one. Christ. I went to Uni in Sheffield and within a few weeks I met the girl who would take my virginity and start a love/hate relationship with for a number of months. I threw up on her during sex once, so she had good cause.

We were a nightmare. Sex, love, arguing, falling out then petty acts to piss each other off. Rinse and repeat.

There were plenty of incidents of us winding each other up after an argument - taking each other’s CDs, padlocking wardrobes shut, emptying fridges etc. But one time, after a major bust-up and when she owed me a few quid, one of my mates who was her housemate, let me into her room.

I took her telly.

I left a note along the lines of ‘you’ll get your telly back when I get my money back’ and then gleefully walked down Ecclesall Road with a telly with a massive arse, thinking I was the business. It didn’t do much for the Liverpool stereotype. It was a mile walk home and I was fucked when I got there.

Smugly waiting for a call or text to resolve it, there was a knock on the door. Plod. I had to explain the whole story to these two knobheads who told me to take it back and they’d forget the matter. I asked them for a lift, but as Scousers and South Yorkshire Police didn’t exactly get on back then, I had to walk all the way with it only to be greeted by these two pricks and the on/off girlfriend who couldn’t hide their joy.

I was humiliated and raging, but my final interaction with her was a few weeks later. She bounced into the Roxy nightclub at the end of the night, bumped into me and immediately put the lips on me, after apologising for how she handled it.

Little did she know, I’d just been on the stage and had been fed a tin of cat food by Reg Holdsworth, so my breath tasted like death.

Glory days.

Edited February 5 by Frankie Crisp

[Tamura]

Running off a couple of hundred copies of my 50ish page fanzine on the photocopier at work, without realising there was a built-in counter. In fairness I did supply my own paper, as we didn't use that much and it would have looked mighty suspicious if we'd suddenly used 12 reams in a week. Luckily I was indispensible at that point in time, but the boss did make me use the local print shop for future issues.

[neil]

35 minutes ago, Frankie Crisp said:

I spent the next three years funding a new window in a shit supermarket

3 years? Fucking hell, should've taken a 2 week stretch at Walton instead.

35 minutes ago, Frankie Crisp said:

I threw up on her during sex once, so she had good cause

How on earth did that happen...

36 minutes ago, Frankie Crisp said:

I’d just been on the stage and had been fed a tin of cat food by Reg Holdsworth

...ah fair play mate

[Callum1993]

This one is on behalf of my Dad. When I was about 10 we were driving down a dual carriageway and there were a group of Seagulls eating another dead seagull in the middle of the road. He didn’t have time to brake so went through the middle of them and luckily we thought we’d missed all of them. 
 

As we got closer to home we noticed a police car following us who then indicated for us to pull over. My Dad got out and the police officer uttered the immortal words ‘I’ve pulled you over for two reasons. One you were going a bit fast back there. And two you have a dead seagull stuck to the front of your car’. My Dad got a ticking off from the officer and then had to spend 5 minutes trying to remove the seagull which was somehow wedged into the front of the car. 

[Jazzy G]

2 hours ago, Mr_Danger said:

You fools are going to be raided by Teedy Kay and the boys in the morning. 

Only if he's working for Interpol. 

In 2008 I was on holiday in Basel, Switzerland. It's right on the French and German borders. I spent much of the holiday just riding around on the tram and eating the McGruyere (a forerunner to whatever the Big Tasty is called nowadays). 

Anyway, one day I get the tram to a stop called St Louis Grenze and set off walking down the road, past this big building in the middle of the road, and as I'm walking I spot a sign and see that suddenly the prices are in Euros instead of Swiss Francs, and everything is written in French instead of German. I turn around and see that this big building in the middle of the road has DOUANE written on it in huge letters. I'd walked into France without my passport, and immediately panicked and set off back into Switzerland in case I had a run-in with the local gendarmerie. 

[JNLister]

On 2/4/2024 at 3:14 PM, Devon Malcolm said:

y @Frankie Crisp

I'm not paying for carrier bags from the Co-Op. I don't mind paying for plastic ones from everywhere else but these are biodegradable so in my mind they're fine to nick. 

I'm happy to pay for them to use in the  food bin because they are basically the exact same thing as the caddy liners they sell but cheaper.

[JNLister]

On 2/4/2024 at 8:20 PM, TibBo said:

When I used to work at a quiet local pub, I found out that you could scam the 20p sweet machines with the turning handles, by wedging a matchstick in them and dropping a 1p in. I was never on shift to see the guy refill the machines and find all the bits of matchstick stuck inside sadly.

Most useful thing I learned at university was that these machines also work with a 1p coin wrapped in the film from the top flap of a cigarette packet. Would have been more useful if I smoked.

[simonworden]

Back in the early days of secondary school I realised by buying the biggest Sunday papers "for my dad" I could stuff a couple of grot mags in and get away with it. This turned into a lucrative little business where I'd grab a couple every Sunday and sell them to people at school for £5 a pop. 

The other one that springs to mind was a summer job in a pub back home between uni terms. The old couple had masses of old bottle of wine and Pimm's that were never going to get sold just lying in the cellar. I used to have to head out there after lock up to cycle home so I'd often pinch a bottle or two if I was heading to a party. Most were probably out of date and couldn't be sold so I don't feel too guilty about it. 

[Gus Mears]

Less petty crime and more accidental vandalism.

It was £1 knock-off Jagerbomb night at one of the student bars in Bath and full of social anxiety, I downed about ten in an hour, blacked out and woke up in a walled off and beautifully maintained garden with a broken ankle. I'd full on Jannety'd it, foot upside down, a complete shambles, and when I say 'walled off', I really mean it too. It must have been 12 foot on three sides and with a Georgian three-story house on the other. In enormous amounts of pain, I shuffled over to the house and knocked on the door hoping that the residents would forgive my stupidity and understand why I was in their private garden at midnight on a Monday. Maybe in their kindness they would even call me an ambulance considering I could hardly move. No reply. No lights, no signs of life. So, I phoned Adam, one of the people I went to the bar with, which proved resoundingly useless:

"Adam. I really need help. I've broken my ankle and am stuck in a garden."

"Was wondering where you'd got to. Shit. Sounds serious. Where are you?"

"I don't know."

"How did you get there?"

"I don't know."

"Sound mate, catch you tomorrow."

The next half hour was spent in utterly feeble attempts to bash the back door down and yelling into the night that I needed help to - again - no response. Running out of ideas besides phoning the police to grass myself in, I noticed a rockery in the corner of the garden and spent the next hour hopping back and forth between it and the lowest point in the wall, carrying one rock at a time until the whole rockery had been moved. When that had been exhausted, then came benches, lawn chairs, a bird bath, anything I could add to the pile.

I was about 2AM when finally rolled my way onto the summit of the wall, the once magnificent garden below laid to waste. Just fucked, it was March and it had been raining, so between dragging everything and putting all my weight on one side, it looked like the Samoan rugby team had gone for a kickabout on it. I still feel guilty about it and try as I might, I never found that garden again. I hopped very slowly made it back to halls where my flat mate, who was 1000% times more useful than Adam had been, carried me to A&E down the road over his shoulder like a sack of shit.