Big or small, cheap or expensive.
Did you find any specific use for the item?
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!
But that’s permission
Only from the the guy one level above… Who was also filling his car with supplies without the knowledge of his boss or his bosses boss.
It’s car filling bosses all the way up
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)
18 square meters eh.
Now, if I was trying to destroy financial records, I could think of worse ways than for them to “accidentally” be shipped to an employee and “lost.” Even better if the employee actually destroys them for me.
It kind of sounds like the sort of antics a company about to go under and unable to pay debtors/taxes might do…
Doesn’t work that way here. The tax department already has a copy of all these records. The company just lost their copy. So now that tax department can claim anything they want :)
Also I was not an employee. If I was, then I might have some obligation to do something. However these were former clients who simply didn’t pay their bills (so… not even clients). So no contractual agreement existed between them and me – for a contract to be valid, it has to include due consideration (e.g. a payment received in return for some service). Since I was never paid, no valid contract existed.
Nothing big but I’m the one in the office who decides what gets thrown away. It’s amazing what I find dumpster diving immediately after I’ve cleaned an area.
Someone’s trash is someone’s treasure!
No. Edit: Wait, COVID. I took COVID home.
I always kept copies of my design/work even if my contract states that they belong to the company.
I do too. I wouldn’t use them for anything else, but it’s nice to have them to look at as an accomplishment, right? :)
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.
The rate at which I steal from work is directly proportional to my pay rate.
So the more you get paid, the more you steal? (sorry, had to 😛 it’s quite obvious what you mean of course)
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.
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.
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!
When I worked at KFC I stole an entire bag of country gravy mix. That shit lasted me years.
I also stole an entire box of frozen strawberries when I worked at Jamba Juice. Ended up giving a lot of them away.
And toilet paper when I worked at Blockbuster.
I feel like the gravy mix isn’t supposed to be safe to eat that long. Might explain why you stole the toilet paper.
If its the mix then its prolly powder.
I have spent a lot of my life scavenging old tech others have lost the use for. A couple months ago I picked up a projector I can hook up to a laptop to watch movies. That’s the biggest/nicest I’ve taken from work.
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
I work for a bank (I know I know, fuck me right?).
They give us new laptops every couple years and only once in 10 years have they requested the old one back. I’m certainly not going out of my way to return their equipment if they can’t be bothered to at least ask.
So now I have 3 laptops that aren’t mine and don’t get used, I’ll format and sell them when I can be bothered and I certainly won’t feel bad about doing it. They can definitely afford it, and they’re not exactly a philanthropic venture so I don’t really care if they can’t. If I cost the bank another £1000 or so then I call that a win personally.
A brand new Keurig
I and the one other guy remaining at our old office for 6mo while we finished the move and got ready for demo didn’t drink coffee, but HR made sure we had a brand new machine. At the end of the 6 months I took it for my wife. That was 5 or 6 years ago now and it’s still the quick coffee machine when I don’t wanna bother making espresso
Other than that mostly office supply doodads for random shit, like a handful of paperclips to turn into bowl plugs, or printing a shipping label on works nice sticker labels. You know, office perks
I hear you.
My boss looked me in a funny way and said “Sure, go ahead!” when I asked permission to take 1-2 pens back home.
I know it might be silly but I just felt that I wanted to ask, to have a clean conscience.
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.
Working for a tech company, working from home is allowed. Each employee receive a monitor, mouse, keyboard,… to be able to work from home. During Covid, my wife who is working for a social organisation, had to work from home, on a super small pc without any equipment provided. One day, I went to my office, took a screen and went back home with it. We still have it now. #wishRobinHood
I also took a bowl to put water for my cat.
