Have you ever committed petty larceny?

Does anyone want to talk about anything they've stolen in the past? I'm talking about physical objects.

I'm not going to berate anyone who admits to stealing something, because I've got no ground to stand on to criticize anyone else. This is just a discussion.

Nope. Never stole a thing in my life.

I remember wanting a pack of smarties when I was like... four. I wasn’t allowed to have them so I broke them out of anger. I felt so bad about it I told my mother and she paid for them.

First job (deli), I worked with a guy who stole a pack of pens every night. Went on for a year plus, never got caught to my knowledge. I never reported him, guess that’s about as close to stealing as I get.

Ironically I got fired from that job for “stealing” $0.99. Two people called out one night, leaving me by myself while the department and district manager were “doing inventory” (aka talking all night). Had a never ending line of customer and finally got out to break three hours late. I made myself a meatball sub, which isn’t on the menu, so I did it up by weight. Came out to $1.90-something, and I priced it $2.50 since I made it for myself while on the clock (no real choice—managers were fucking off, I was alone, and you can’t use the equipment while off the clock). Next day they said I owed $3.49, the regular price of a sub.

I exited high school with delusions of grandeur and James Moriarty as my role model. A less-than-glamorous five-ish years of criminality followed, including many months where I could have accurately claimed "thief" as my occupation. I've stolen cash, food, mobile phones, trading cards, chemicals, and the wheels right out from people's cars.

This ended with me waking up one day to find my roommates gone, and all of my valuables along with them. Including "our" car. Looking back I wish I'd received my rude awakening sooner.

I got a story about my struggles as a thief looking for a safe place to fence something.

Over a decade ago, I jacked an old Fender Stratocaster. The fucking thing was just sitting in someone's back seat unlocked, on a street in a downtown area. Not a lot of people around.

This wasn't like one of these cheap knock-offs they're selling for a few hundred $. I was paranoid to even sell the guitar anywhere local. Sat on it for over a year, and ended up driving a couple states over to sell the thing. A guy handed me $5000 cash for it. The guitar was probably worth around $10-$12k. It was a very desirable guitar. The thing is, I was smart enough to know had I tried to take a guitar worth that much money to a local pawn shop the same day I stole it, I would have got busted.

When I was a little kid, like 4 or so, I literally stole candy from a baby. I wasn't caught.
Then when I was about 11, I stole some stuff from a candy store. It was like one of those thrill thefts, not because I didn't have money. It was me and my friend and I stole some lip gloss for my girlfriend, and some other junk. We got caught and they called our parents. Nowadays, they would think the lip gloss was for me.
Anyway, I got yelled at and apologized to the store owner and that was that.

Stole a Mad Magazine when I was around 10 from a drugstore. Still have it to this day. My best friend stole candy as I was taking the magazine. Never did that again. I didn't get any real thrill from doing it so I figured thievery is not in my blood. I don't even jack pens from work because it just reminds me of work.

In high school I developed a penchant for grabbing small items and pocketing them.

Some times these items were worthless, other times they had a value (looking back I don't think I pocketed anything more than $20 in a single item's worth).

The appeal came from the thrill, and not the item value. I grew out of this and mellowed out considerably in college.

Oddly, I stopped being a kleptomaniac when I started picking up alcohol.

When I was a kid, me and some of the neighborhood kids would wear hoodies and pretend to be thieves. We had a game where we'd try to steal from each other, but we would eventually give the stuff back after a week.

Anyway, the game started to enter semi-serious territory, and I ended up jacking my friend's bike after he stole one of my Sega Genesis games (Altered Beast). He says he took it, then lost it. I didn't believe him, and I was gonna keep his bike until he gave me my fucking game back.

This little bitch goes and cries to his dad over the bike, but I ended up getting my game back. I was never friends with the kid afterwards.

There was another time, and this was before the above events happened, that we got into a vacant house. Nobody knew who lived there, and nobody was ever seen there, but there was stuff inside of the house. Anyway, we sneaked into the backyard like the little thieves we were, and made our way in through the kitchen window (it was unlocked).

When we got in this place, there was a bunch of random shit laying around. And then we noticed some jars full of coins, but they weren't US currency, but misc currency probably from all around the globe. In one of the rooms was 3 pinball machines. They all appeared to have money in them. But we didn't have the keys. We looked around, and in one of the jars with coins was a keychain with 3 keys on it. Sure enough they fit the machines. They were full of quarters. About $150 worth of quarters total. We split it between the 3 of us. I still remember helping to count the stacks out. Not bad for a heist for some 8-10 year old kids, right?

It was a small phase my group went through in high school. Stole candy from 7-11 by putting it at the bottom of a slurpee (back before the cups were transparent), escalated to books from a newsagency and culminated in D and D manuals stuffed up our shirts. The thrill soon wore off though, and one of us confessed. There was some sort of punishment and we got on with our lives. Whole period probably lasted about six months. Maybe a year.

Not proud of it (unlike some pathetic braggarts I see in here) and not really bothered by it either. If I'm going to hell it won't be for breaking that particular commandment.