Without encouraging anyone to confess to anything for which the statute of limitations hasn’t already been reached, and recognizing that some of you may have lived your entire lives as upright citizens, nevertheless I am thinking that may not have been the case with all of us. Maybe I'll find out that I'm the only criminal in the room. When I was in high school, the prosecuting attorney for Menominee County was cracking down on kids in Menominee, prosecuting things that were previously ignored. A couple of friends and I got both his home address and office address, and signed him up for every junk mail thing we could find, particularly classified advertisements from porn magazines. We signed him up for penpal advertisements, and for ads in the back of comic books. We even went around to laundromats to find magazines that we didn't know about. At that time, you could order magazines and other items from advertisements in magazines without paying in advance, so we ordered him all sorts of stuff, mostly going to his office address. He was subscribed to every magazine we could think of, and a member of every book or record club we knew of. We paid to have an ad run in the Pennysaver, giving his office address, advertising free Saint Bernard puppies to give away to a good home, with papers. We paid to run an ad in the newspaper for a “going out of business” sale, advertising used office furniture, file cabinets, and communications equipment. To that last one, the prosecutor ran an ad on the radio, saying that there was no sale, and criticizing the newspaper for accepting an advertisement without verification. The funny thing was that one of my friends was working as a DJ for the radio station, so he got to read the ad. I was imagining people coming to his office and asking him how much he wanted for the desk. Okay, that was mean, and I don’t know that I would have wanted my son doing that, but it it was fun at the time.
Ken, I gave you a "like" on this as I too thought it was funny....but then again it didn't happen to me....grin Seriously though, did you feel the guilt later?
No, not really. Maybe if I had heard more about any problems that it might have caused (like, maybe that his wife had left him because of the porn stuff he was getting in the mail or something), or if I had met him later and learned that he was actually a nice guy, but the going out of business sale ad was the only one that we got any feedback on.
Ha ha, those are some good ones @Ken Anderson! The only thing we ever did was prank calls. I'm sure some of the boys did things like that but I wasn't involved....I was a good girl.
During High School football game season I took part in a few "toilet paper" rolling of friends houses and yards. Most of the time if it was the houses and yards of good friends, we would all go help clean up the mess we had fun making. And like @Chrissy Cross I did my share of prank calling too. The closest I ever came to being put in jail (through no fault of my own) though, came from working after school at the then Nona theatre over here. Management decided to run a movie called "The Fox" where two women kissed each other. And even though the Theatre was warned against running that Movie they did it anyway. I was working the day it first played and not long after the first feature started and that kiss was shown....the police showed up. Our Manager was not at the Theatre at the time, I was selling tickets that day. The police took me and all the other workers and put us in their police cars and took us down to the station. I got finger printed, and they were just about to take my "convict" picture when our Manager came in the room and yelled for them to stop! Evidently the police knew what they were doing wasn't legal because they did stop and took the sign with the ID number that hung around my neck off of me. It was pretty exciting to all of us actually since nothing like that had ever happened before. The only thing I was upset about was that on the ride to the police station we passed a guy I liked at school who was riding his bicycle and saw me in the back seat of the police car! Of course news spread fast that day and it was a long time until friends and others stopped teasing me about the day I got arrested (almost).
When I was eleven, I stole an unmarked police car, and I got all the way to Okemah OK before they caught me. I was desperate to get away from the foster home I was in. It worked, after the authorities got ahold of me, I was able to tell them why I ran in the first place, and after my mother threatened to give the story to the news papers, the police decided not to press charges. In the end, I was placed in a new foster home, and that's all I wanted in the first place. Even today, CPS rarely listen to children before they make decisions that effect that child. I knew it was wrong, but I thought if grown ups could do bad things to me, and no one cared, then steeling that car was of little consequences. That was the extent of my criminal behavior.
This one was not so long ago, but when I worked for an ambulance company in McAllen, Texas, the policy was for medics not to leave their ambulances running while they were eating in a restaurant, as many of them were in the habit of doing. I was the training officer, so the director and I would check up on people every now and then. Two of our crews were eating together at a restaurant near the boundaries of their service areas, which was fine. We knew they were there because all of that stuff was always tracked. But when we got there, we found that both of the ambulances had been left running. We drove the ambulances to the other side of the building, where they couldn't be seen from the door, and had the dispatcher call both of them out on a fake emergency call. I think that was far more effective than simply writing them up.
@Ken Anderson why did they leave their rigs running? You would think they would be worried about being accused of siphoning off the gas. (By the way, that's how I got that unmarked police car. They left if running. I think if I had known it was a police car, I would not have taken it. But, I was so afraid that my foster father would catch me, that steeling was the least of my worries.) Thank goodness that my children never heard of my escapade. I was a very strict parent. My children never even had a baby sitter until they were at least 10 years old, and this included family members as well. I wanted to make sure they were old enough to know when an adult was doing the wrong thing. Now when I was twenty eight, I went with my oldest son who was fourteen at the time, and one of his buddies, then the three of us picked up his football coach's VW Bug and turned it sideways in his parking space. It was the coach's retirement game, and what we did was minor to some of the other pranks.