Big or small, cheap or expensive.
Did you find any specific use for the item?
No. Edit: Wait, COVID. I took COVID home.
Hahaha fuck yeah!
Microwave, lounge, fridge, dozen office chairs and a shit load of stationary.
Legend
Office was closing down and the local boss said anything not on the asset register was fair game!
So much shit. I work in restaurants so I take food all the time. My food budget is tiny.
Back when I was much more brazen, all my plates, cups, pots, pans and cleaning supplies were from work.
The rate at which I steal from work is directly proportional to my pay rate.
Oh this happened to me in reverse. My workplace (a client’s office, technically) dumped a bunch of stuff at my house without permission, and I did not keep it. Expected me to store boxes and boxes of financial records, for infinity years, no contract or anything. They also defaulted on money owed to me, which I had to pay taxes on, even though I received nothing. Never have I met such an arrogantly entitled company owner.
Sold it all as scrap paper. Recovered 0.005% of the money owed this way. Later their company was dissolved due to nonpayment of taxes. If they ever come back to the country, they may have heir passport withheld until they pay what’s owed. Which is whatever the tax department says it is, because they have no financial records.
Hmm. But can you get in trouble for destroying this financial record stuff?
The company which is responsible for their own financial records can get in trouble. And he could get in trouble if he destroyed them at their office. But if they dumped them at his house without a contract then he is free to dispose of them from his property.
No. He’s responsible for caring for those, not me. If I dump my tax records on your front lawn, that’s on me – you can just leave them there in the rain or wait for the city to pick them up. If there was some form of contract in place I would be more careful, of course.
(FYI my current home is 18 square meters. There is no front lawn. Storing them would be impossible even if I wanted to)
If you’re not stealing from work, work is stealing from you
Honestly, even if you are.
At this one office I worked at, none of their ergonomic equipment was asset-tagged for some reason, and everybody knew about it. So whenever somebody with a lot of ergo gear got fired or quit, it was a race to raid their desk and plunder their equipment. Management never looked into it because nothing was tagged, so they never qualified what equipment was given out in order to claim as missing in the first place.
I got a decent keyboard and trackball mouse out of it. I know a few people that managed to sneak out some of the $800+ chairs, but that always felt too risky to me.
At another place I worked at, they were upgrading all their computers at every desk. I asked the dude swapping then out what they do with the old machines. He told me they were literally being taken out back to a pile to be scrapped/recycled. I asked if I could take one, he said he wasn’t allowed to give them to me, but he then reiterated exactly where the pile of old computers was. I took the hint, snuck around the back of the building and grabbed one of the tiny little OptiPlex Minis. Used it as a media center for a little while.
Nice try, boss.
About 3000 years ago I worked as a night security guard in a place where we’d often have celebrities during the day. One night during one of my rounds I found an iPod in the parking lot. Went back to the control room and started going through the menus to see if I could figure out who it belonged to, and based on the device’s name I realized it belonged to an abject asshole of a media personality / early “influencer” of sorts, who got rich by “preaching” what amounted to a secular prosperity gospel, essentially a cheerleader for the “fuck you, I got mine”-brand of capitalism.
I can say I didn’t have to think too many milliseconds about what to do with the device and felt no pangs of guilt about yoinking it. I used it for years and years, and probably much longer than that particular dude would have since I mainly worked low income jobs and I couldn’t have afforded a new one even if I wanted to.
I reset the device but kept its name as it was, just as a sort of small personal 🖕 to that guy.
Honestly, no, I don’t think so. I’ve taken things home to keep, with permission (limited design beer glasses, mostly, some old uniforms once the design changes); and I’ve taken home disposable supplies without permission (steel scrubs, sharpies, expo markers); and I’ve taken things that would otherwise be thrown out to give as gifts (best one was a six-inch Le Creuset enameled cast iron Dutch oven).
But if a job treats me right I don’t steal, and if they don’t I either force them to or leave.
Old computer equipment. It wasn’t being used for anything, and would have ended up being thrown out if I didn’t take it. Stuff was too old to be useful in a business environment now, but I built a small retro gaming rig running Windows 98 out of it.
Way back in '99 I was a student worker for the IT group at uni. We were decommissioning about 350 486 machines. Once the drives were cleared they were taken off the books and we were told to take them to the dumpster.
Very few made the dumpster. I ended up with about 14 of them. I did a whole lotta of network projects, setup routers on them, and even had a pile as a coffee table for a bit.
They ran like champs for a long time, but eventually didn’t make the long move to another house in about 2005.
Yeah, as a teacher I took notebooks and pens n stuff. Ok the other hand, I had to do a lot of that work on my spare time to prepare for lectures and communication with pupils. I also bought stuff for the pupils to make the lectures more interesting as the school has a very strict budget
I get a feeling that it is to be expected that you use tools your workplace has, to, well, do your job 😁
And since you also spend your own resources for the greater good…I fail to even understand that how your input would be considered as stealing 😂 More like the contrary!
I’m amazed how many people are thieves. I don’t mean that in a judgemental way. It’s just so different to how I love my life. I’m somewhat taken aback by the comments about what people have stolen.
There are many reasons and starting points in these stories.
My favorite stealing stories are the ones that include items that would go to trash anyway/otherwise. I dislike the idea of stuff going to trash that needed materials and services to be created (no doubt creating some pollution while a it)…it’d just be such a waste.
Those situations feel more legitimate/reasonable to take something while passing.I agree, a common one I see is when people justify stealing from the rich (companies) because “they can afford it”.
The robin hood mentality is a cop out justification for thievery
A cop out or a coping mechanism. Employers steal so much from employees: time, wages, sense of purpose, sometimes even health. And most of us don’t have good ways to stop them (because socienty). So stealing a bit back might actually help feeling less hopeless.
In the US, wage theft eclipses all other forms of theft combined.
I took a big box of cat-5 from when my office was being shut down. I made ethernet cables of varying lengths as I needed them.
Eventually they called me back and hired me as management in a new area and I worked there for 7 more years. No regrets. Would steal again.
I’m a field tech, once I was installing a line at a customer not far from home, my company supplied a box with 300m of CAT6 cable to wire everything up but the customer insisted that we use their own, armored cable. For my company it was part of the supply, already billed. I drove there so I could carry whatever I wanted. That box of cable is now in my garage.
My first experience with stealing something without permission was a family member bringing home the keys to their workplace by mistake, putting the clothes whose pocket they were inside in the washer, and then me being hit with anxiety at school because the keys travelled into my uniform skirt pocket while in the washer which made me think I stole them because someone noticed.
It ignited my lifetime career as master thiefno just kidding my sister came to the rescue. But I would never be immune to the same habit of accidental key-taking when I got older.Accidents happen!
Primary school me didn’t know that, I had to be cheered up in the bathroom.
The older and more disillusioned I grow, the more I do it.
Nothing expensive tho.