Not including actual crimes, what kind of juvenile delinquent hijinks did you get up to?
Posted by wrathofimpermanence@reddit | GenX | View on Reddit | 802 comments
In the days of yore, before social media, what kind of crazy stuff did you get up to?
I now mentor a couple of 24-year-olds at work, and I'm not sure I could explain to them how at their age, I always had a case of beer in the trunk of my car, and a couple of bowling balls in the backseat footwell of my 77 Grand Prix.
besides drinking beer at work every night during our lunch hour, we also experimented with dropping bowling balls from high places.
I doubt I'm an outlier, so tell me some stories!
twistedtuba12@reddit
I covered a man's car in 500 maxipads. He was a jerk. I used the wing variety for max coverage.
Masters_domme@reddit
Was he going through a rough period?
CarpeBurger@reddit
I just spat out my Metamucil.
Moonlit-Daisy@reddit
Luvtahoe@reddit
Bravo!
CarpeBurger@reddit
Friends paired out into 3 groups with jugs of bubble bath.
Synchronized our watches.
We hit the fountains at the 3 malls we hung out in. Echelon, Deptford and Cherry Hill.
All the fountains bubbled up at the same time. It was so exhilarating.
Then we smoked some dirt weed and slammed some Mad Dog and chain smoked cigarettes. When we ran out of smokes we went to one of the Wawa’s nearby.
If you timed it right the pastry and bread guy comes to take the day-olds and refill the box with fresh stuff for the morning. If he was cool he’d give us the bag of donuts, fritters stale Amoroso’s.
Then we’d drive around throwing donuts at people.
THORmonger71@reddit
I have no idea who did it, but the fountain stunt happened at least once at King Of Prussia. I had to admit it was impressive to behold.
CarpeBurger@reddit
That’s hilarious.
No-Property1871@reddit
Playing ding dong ditch… also ding dong ditch in the cemetary
WinterDawnMI@reddit
😳 How does that even work?
No-Property1871@reddit
I was one of the younger kids in the group… so I’m sure it was to scare the living daylights out of me!
No-Property1871@reddit
🤣🤣☠️
RaulDuke_76@reddit
When I was at house parties me and my friend would re-arrange the kitchen. Swapping drawers, swapping cereal for pasta, and stuff like that. You could clean the house and still get burned as soon as your parents tried to find a fork. For people we didn’t like…well: 1) tape of the ‘sink sprayer’ 2) jello mix in the toilet tank, plastic wrap pulled tight over the toilet 3) a bit of mouthwash in the eye drop bottle. 4) peroxide in the shampoo And on and on. What a bunch of little pricks we were😁😬🤣😂
MaddMango68@reddit
At a HS house party we actually turned a car in the garage sideways. Good luck explaining that to your parents.
RaulDuke_76@reddit
That is top notch shenanigans!!
rapiertwit@reddit
A high school friend and I used to make pipe bombs and blow up rotten tree stumps in the woods, and tie rocks to them and throw them off a pier to stun fish and scoop them up with a net, or bury them in the sand at a remote beach we used to hang out at, and watch the sand fly.
My friend also made a flamethrower by modifying a water gun (not nearly as dangerous as a real one, it used rubbing alcohol rather than napalm LOL).
On the Fourth of July one year we used multiple model rocket engines to make a super rocket, that was stuffed with various small fireworks. It went really fucking high before detonating way up in the clouds. That was possibly the stupidest thing we did, because if the trajectory had arced and it came back down before exploding we could have fucked some shit up and maybe hurt someone.
We also played with mounting model rocket engines to various model airplanes and old GI Joe vehicles. And we made a rocket powered model speedboat boat one time.
One summer in elementary school a friend and I were really into making elastic-powered dart guns. We had a lot of prototypes from our experiments refining our designs, so we disassembled the motion-activated light on his house and used the sensor to make a motion-triggered booby trap that peppered an area with darts. Then we spent two afternoons walking in front of it while carrying an old door in front of us, while we got the aim just right and we were satisfied. When most of the darts hit the door as we walked past, we figured it was a pretty good trap.
Some prank wars that got out of hand. Two of my friends filled someone’s car with grass clippings in retaliation for them TPing one of their cars.
MercyfulFrigate@reddit
Everything we used to do is a crime now.
Shooting bottle rockets at each other was fun.
RedSparrow1971@reddit
It’s a crime unless you’re a member of the Jackass cast 🤩
SurpriseDesperate156@reddit
So were Roman candle fights
SelectLifeguard3902@reddit
I'm uncomfortable with this conversation lol.
Think_Cheesecake7464@reddit
The silliest I can think of is when a marquis outside a salon said “PERMS $50” a friend of mine moved the “S” to the beginning of the word.
smalltowngirlisgreen@reddit
😂 sperm! We changed a furniture store sign to say "come boing on a bed now". I have no idea what it said originally lol
Think_Cheesecake7464@reddit
Hahahaha!
happydaysahead1111@reddit
Fake ID when I was 18. Actually used someone's birth certificate (with her knowledge), at the DMV. I've always wondered how much trouble I'd be in if I got caught. My fingerprints with her name! It's been over 40 years, so I think I'm safe! Lolol
VisualBasic@reddit
I’ve alerted the authorities so expect a knock on your door today!
happydaysahead1111@reddit
I'll be waiting! Lolol
stripmallbars@reddit
We would drag race our muscle cars
Monkeynutz_Johnson@reddit
There's my people. I had to explain over and over that in the 80s, 60s muscle cars were just old cars and you could pick one up for cheap. If I still had everything I owned back then I could retire.
stripmallbars@reddit
I had a red 1974 Dodge Dart Sport with a 440, headers and a thrust shifter. I can’t remember what other aftermarket stuff was on it. I had some badass mags. It was fast. It would push you back in the seat if you downshifted and floored it at 55mph. You could watch the gas gauge go down. I’m a woman btw.
Monkeynutz_Johnson@reddit
I had a 64 chevelle with the solid lifter 327, a 4 speed and a bench seat. Light to light it was super quick. You could have all sorts of unsavory fun in that car. Later it was a 67 camero with a 396, also a 4 speed. Then a 74 blazer that i rebuilt the engine in. The blazer was the party barge for my friend group. Sounds like we would've been friends back then.
stripmallbars@reddit
If you had weed then yes!
Monkeynutz_Johnson@reddit
No occifer, I don't smell anything.
NerdMusk@reddit
Sneak out past curfew around 2 am with some friends down to the video rental store or 7-11 to play SF2 when it had just come out. The game thing STILL had a long-ass line!
Undersolo@reddit
Nice try, FBI.
MorpheusZzzz@reddit
Have they already run out of their own nefarious ideas?? 😂
SlowFunk_Llama@reddit
We used to go potato knocking. It’s when you stick a coat hangar through a potato and hook it onto someone’s doorknob with some fishing line attached. You then hide a safe distance away behind some bushes, pull the line a few times to simulate knocking, and just wait for people to answer the door. When they open the door, they assume someone dingdong ditched them, only to close the door and hear the knocking again seconds later. While possibly terrifying for the victim, it was straight up hilarious for the perpetrators.
Both-Mango1@reddit
house for sale signs in best friend's yard showing up on Saturday nights.
rearranging letters on portable signs to say different things.
parties in parking garages at night.
Old_Hovercraft_9219@reddit
Found out that the keys to our car worked in the same make and model. Shenanigans ensued.
No-Meringue2388@reddit
Toyota Corolla?
Old_Hovercraft_9219@reddit
Nope. Not nearly as common as a Corolla.
WiscoMac@reddit
Cherry bombs on time delay fuses in the HS bathroom. Shook the whole school, several times.
No-Meringue2388@reddit
I swapped the hanging signs of a local church and crematorium?
Essycat@reddit
What are you, a cop?
No-Meringue2388@reddit
‘Cause you gotta tell us you’re a cop.
Sad_Language2555@reddit
Pumpkins, dropping them off buildings….
Mgcreates@reddit
Tossing pennies out of the car window (accidentally tagged a jogger once and knocked him out, so that ended that), hiding in the ditch and scaring cars at night, of course the obligatory TPing houses, trespassing in abandoned buildings. I think the most fun, though, was on game nights at school we would use a wad of paper to block the lock on a back stairwell exit. Once the game started, we'd run the building and hang out for a couple of hours.
gregs1027@reddit
Mailbox Baseball.
Removed hubcaps and put marbles inside,then put back on.
Taped "I'm Stupid" sign to back of Police car.
Put a potato into campus securities tailpipe.
Dropped Oxygen tanks from the roof of the chem building at the university.
Ran out of 7/11 with cases of beer becuae it was after midnight and we weren't 21.
Mgcreates@reddit
As a teen, there were a couple of months where some of the neighborhood jackasses were riding through at 3am playing mailbox baseball. My dad's parents lived across the street and they got hit 3 or 4 times. Finally, the old man got sick of it. He was a mechanic/metal worker, so he changed the post to steel and made a steel box. With some flat black paint, you couldn't see a difference. A few nights later, I woke up to a loud *DINK!* and some guy screaming in pain. Never another problem on that street.
alkaidkoolaid@reddit
Used to party in the woods, we would buy beer balls and cut them open with a knife and then dunk our solo cups in because we didn’t always have a tap.
We designated the area to be called The Point. Later found out that the said location was essentially right near where Arthur Shawcross (serial killer) would dispose of all his bodies.
Cool. 😬
cjasonac@reddit
Beer balls. Now that’s something I haven’t thought about in a while.
alkaidkoolaid@reddit
🍻
thisisnotnorman@reddit
The ROC in the 90s was a hell of a place
alkaidkoolaid@reddit
It sure was.
itaintme99@reddit
Had a girlfriend in high school who had a friend working the desk at a hotel, holiday inn I think. She’d give us a key to an unbooked room sometimes, it was a nice change from the back seat of my car!
AbrasiveFingaBang@reddit
Luuuucky!
itaintme99@reddit
And I know I’m dating myself but it was literally a 🔑 lol
Chris_The-Wookie@reddit
There were no cameras so IDINDONUFFIN!!!!
OtterMumzy@reddit
Pool hopping, clothes lining (stealing) at the beach, driving without a license,
ElCaminoLady@reddit
Throwing bottle rockets to see how far they would go into the woods.. Lucky we didn’t torch our hands or start a forest fire..
Pushed a shopping cart all around the parking lot with my Monte Carlo. It has annoyed me forever that people just leave their carts anywhere.. Me and the friend I was with where giggling so hard I had a tough time keeping the cart aligned on the bumper..
Of course lots of street racing. I had a vintage mopar. At the time fox body mustangs were the cheap and fast option. A lot of boys cried when they got gapped by a baby blue duster with a daisy taped to the antenna..
I did power slides with that car too that would have made the dukes of hazard blush!
WaterwingsDavid@reddit
What kind of Mopar? They had the best muscle cars!
ElCaminoLady@reddit
‘72 Plymouth Duster. Was a plain ol base model out of the factory but my stepdad was a gearhead and dropped a 360 in it. Had sure grip, cragar mags and sidepipes too.. Was fast and looked awesome!
WaterwingsDavid@reddit
Nice! I love Dusters and Valiants!
Alman54@reddit
A friend of mine had a flat black 71 Charger. THAT was a fun car to ride in.
HikeThePines@reddit
Night swimming in the neighbors pools. Utterly impossible now.
Decemberist66@reddit
Hung out in a cemetery with some friends from high school. Around midnight, cops came and chased us out. Good times.
dbscar@reddit
We use to have big bush parties in the cemetery in the 80s.
Dry-Ad-2197@reddit
Excuse me did you say big bush parties
dbscar@reddit
Yes, it was a real thing in the 80s. Big bonfire, rural, sometimes hundreds of kids.
DenverBowie@reddit
At least it wasn’t big bush panties.
phxor@reddit
everything was certainly more bushy in the 80’s
sideways92@reddit
I grew up in a tiny farming community down South. We were the county seat, but in a county of less than 10K people, that just meant we had the stoplight and the courthouse.
We were farm kids, so between school and chores we didn’t have much time. But we did drink a lot of beer, and shoot a lot of skeet. Everybody had a 12ga in their truck - I had a 7iron and a wedge too, but that’s a different story - and we’d gather by the river throwing skeet and drinking brews.
The Police dept (Mr. Jameson and Deputy “Gator” - swear to all that’s holy) closed at 5 on Friday and didn’t reopen until 9 Monday morning. Need the law on the weekend? Call the sheriff.
Gator knew where we got the beer. We knew he knew. So instead of busting us or the store owner (I think they were cousins), he’d stop at the river on Friday afternoons and grab 2-3 cases on his way home. He’d nod; we’d nod back, and he’d take off.
We’d then go back to swimming and shooting skeet.
Bookem25@reddit
Egg each other’s homecoming floats as they were being built. Throw snow balls at police cars.
boondoggler@reddit
Fed
Outrageous_Act585@reddit
Paint balled houses, TP’d as well. Bonin’ in the bone yard. Turning people’s breaker switches off.
vinegar@reddit
I visited Oakland CA and my friend’s breaker box was next to the front door, on the outside of the house! Never seen that before, wtf?
Outrageous_Act585@reddit
Damn! I haven’t seen them at the front door! I’m in CA as well, and always had them in the backyard.
Fermi_DOX75@reddit
I know it's you pops. You ain't gonna trick me into confessing who broke the terracotta planter.
dmcdd@reddit
It froze when it was wet. You shouldn't tell me to water it when there's going to be a freeze.
Grease2feminist@reddit
It was the CAT
lagniappe68@reddit
Goldfish diddit
subhuman_voice@reddit
Ah Ha!
I knew it was you the whole time, Fermi you liar
No_Bake_3627@reddit
Not going to fall for that trap.
BraveLittleFrog@reddit
There is a fountain built in the center of the main road through my dad’s town. In my defense, I was rarely supervised and my best friend was staying over for a few weeks. This was when concentrated laundry detergent was fairly new. It made it so much easier to carry late at night. And pour. And run the mile back home. And get back in bed still giggling. The next morning, we drove into town. BF and so are in the back seat. The two inner lanes were closed as the fire department was still mopping up all the bubbles…
I didn’t fess up to my dad that it was us until years later. He still laughs about it.
ONROSREPUS@reddit
I was a saint.
NaughtyLittleDogs@reddit
My dumb friends and I thought it was hilarious to drive around at night with a Super Soaker, blasting unsuspecting random pedestrians. These days, that would get us arrested or shot by some 2A vigilante. Back then, it was just just teenagers being teenagers...
gnumadic@reddit
In Jr/Sr High School there were lots of shenanigans that included climbing up buildings, trespassing on railroad property, building illegal halfpipes, blowing things up or burning them. In college (far away from my home town) we sometimes piled into a couple cars and did trash can bowling competitions in rich neighborhoods.
DenverBowie@reddit
State school, was it?
gnumadic@reddit
No, private Christian college. 😂
DenverBowie@reddit
It was a wild guess.
Hot_messed@reddit
Kept a thermos of vodka in the car, which we added to slurpees. Sometimes it was rum for cokes in the parking lot at school.🏫
quiet_contrarian@reddit
Ding dong ditch
Prank phone calls
Streaking
TJ Swann
Ouiji board
SnorvusMaximus@reddit
What’s TJ Swann?
CartoonistExisting30@reddit
Cheap, sweet wine.
SnorvusMaximus@reddit
Thanks! I’m asking as there’s two early hip hop artists that had the name but as a European I never knew where it came from.
PeoplePlantsPets@reddit
I would bike or skateboard to a nearish neighborhood (several miles), with old turn of the century homes. I found one that had a great climbing tree next to their garage and accessible from the alley. I’d climb on top of the garage roof and sit under the old tree and read allllll afternoon. It was a great hiding spot!
alkaidkoolaid@reddit
That’s sweet. I used to climb a tree at my house and read too. Judy Blume.
ArugulaAvailable4965@reddit
Drew dicks on bridges
alkaidkoolaid@reddit
🤣
revdon@reddit
Sneaking into the steam tunnels under the Uni buildings, only to find out there are a bunch of one way traps that ring security to come let you out.
revdon@reddit
I sold cans of soda out of my locker in HS. They wouldn't let us have a vending machine... until the VP found out how much I was selling daily. He caved and called the vending company to have a machine installed.
stanleymodest@reddit
Someone found a thick porno magazine at the bus stop outside my highschool. It'd been raining so it was damp. Someone snuck it onto the bus. The bus passed two schools so it'd be packed with kids. We ended up sticking the damp porno pages onto the bus windows. When the bus pulled into the final stop at the train station all the windows in the back half of the bus were covered in hardcore porn. People couldn't complain to the school because there was 2 different schools using the bus so each school would blame the other.
MushyAbs@reddit
Ding Dong Ditch. Fed the annoying neighbor kids dog food and said it was candy. Lit fires in the middle of the cul de sac. Jumped the fence at neighbors pools and went swimming. Snuck out all the time. Held parties at my house when the parents went out of town. Lots and lots of drinking at parks and getting high before school. Shoe polishing the windows of the high school after graduation night.
mmfn0403@reddit
Ding Dong ditch - did that too, except where I come from, we call it playing knick knacks.
MerryJustice@reddit
Ha, this is a bit similar to my list, girl version anyway, rolling houses (toilet paper) , dine and dash, getting wasted at house parties and the houses were trashed afterwards, shoplifting, helping the boys do whatever naughty things they were doing, buying beer illegally because we knew people. Sneaking into all kinds of parties and clubs where we were not supposed to be etc etc
MushyAbs@reddit
I’m a girl! Also shoulder tapping at liquor stores all the crazy things I did lol. And my poor kids can’t put anything over on me !!
Wink527@reddit
There was a Frito-Lay distribution center not to far from where I lived. Every now and then we would jump the fence and acquire a bag or two, or three, or four or a case of Frito-Lay chips.
Wetdogg72@reddit
I drove bus for a time and next to us was a frito lay distribution center. Occasionally they’d bring us boxes of chips, of all kinds or they’d toss them in the dumpster. When I’d see them I’d always grab a few bags! It was awesome.. until.. Across the street and down a ways was a fairly poor housing development and when the kids found out they raided that thing all the time. It got soo bad the guys dumping them had to open ever box and slash every bag. Insurance thing.. probably a safety thing..
DumberBlonde@reddit
Fritos rawk!
proofreadre@reddit
Blue boxing and red boxing payphones
Purple-Wall3847@reddit
TP houses on Halloween and I was notorious for plucking orange road cones everywhere I saw them.
TrilliumHill@reddit
I remember being able to drive over those cones, get them caught in the bumper, then backing up they would flip back up. We may have redirected traffic a few times.
Klutzy_Winter5536@reddit
When I transferred to university in 1993, I caught the tail end of a trend where a group of folks, inspired by the movie “Midnight Madness”, did a late night follow-the-clues hunt. Teams would get a clue, sometimes with a task and/or riddle, that would lead them to a location where the next clue was hidden (on scraps of paper in an envelope). The goal, of course was to make it through all of the clues and tasks within the hour and find your final destination, a house party.
I don’t know how kindly folks would look upon a bunch of college youths being rowdy, driving recklessly, and wandering through public places looking for hidden clues after midnight nowadays.
Klutzy_Winter5536@reddit
University also included following the cute waiter from the late night diner as he got off work, lurking from afar. Riding in my friend’s minivan, singing just slightly out-of-tune with the radio and giggling like idiots. Writing sketch comedy. And perfecting the skill of making promo posters at Kinko’s. I got pretty good at this one:
Klutzy_Winter5536@reddit
Jr. College in a small Texas town theatre department had a lot of late-night coffee drinking then going home to write and art it up until the wee hours. Also, driving backroads with your headlights off, sitting on a roof top looking at the stars.
Highschool was Denny’s after whatever artistic performance. A group of friends got kicked out one night for singing opera.
Jacjac99@reddit
OMG. So many prank calls. So many hours of prank calls!! 😂😂😂
Cutaway2AZ@reddit
A lot of drinking. Wasn’t very exciting. As far as I can remember.
BigBri0011@reddit
At 17 I was 6'6" tall, and had a full beard. Found out I could buy beer as long as I wore my work boots, and not my usual Chuck Taylors.
Well, one Friday the 13th (1989) my parents went out of town for a dog show. I know, cool, right?
Had this planned for months. Collected money so I was able to have a woman I worked with buy me $180 worth of booze from the ABC store. (Alcohol Beverage Control) They actually checked ID so I couldn't get stuff there.
Anyway, it was about 11 and the booze ran out. Can't buy anything alcoholic after midnight, so it was a mad rush to collect some money and go buy some beer. I used to go to a place called Sav-A-Ton, was a gas station with a mini mart. All the ladies there knew me on sight and never asked for ID.
I'm there in line holding 3 cases of Coors, and one guy in front of me at the counter. A cop walks in. Stands right behind me. I'm about to shit on myself. Laura (the cashier) asked for ID. She glanced at the cop when she did so I knew she was scared. I tell her that it was at home since I got a ride since I'd been drinking. She says she can't sell without ID.
Cop leans over and says 'Sell him the damn beer, I'm in a hurry!'. I about fell over. Cop got a 'Thanks, boss' and a fist bump on the way out.
Was an amazing night, was on track to lose my virginity until my parents came home at 2am and I made everyone bail out the back door. Wound up in the ER with a broken nose and broken front teeth. Was still a great night, only the second time I saw boobs for real, and first time to touch (and taste) them.
As my son says #WORTH_IT
Bellebarks2@reddit
HolUp. I think you skipped over some details.
Moonlit-Daisy@reddit
Exactly!!!! Did the boobs punch you in the face?
paulrin@reddit
During my early tweens, me and my older brother and friends used to steal street name signs. Got a street with the same last name as you - we would get it. We had heaps.
DumberBlonde@reddit
My coworkers and I took a gianormous jar of Moby Dills to the roof of a grocery store we worked at and threw them at parked cars. I don't know why.
Moonlit-Daisy@reddit
Well, at least they weren't Moby Dils from the local adult store! That would have been funny, thou! They would just suction to the cars and flap around as people drove off!
RiffRandellsBF@reddit
I'd tell my parents I'm spending the night at a friend's house. He'd tell his parents he was spending the night at mine. In truth, we both spent the night at the home of one girl who's mom was off at the casino all weekend. Her friend was also spending the night. The girl who lived there would make Kahlua and Cream for everyone to drink.
We were in the 8th grade.
The 8th grade.
What the hell was wrong with us?
AdCandid4609@reddit
A group of us went out on a Saturday evening - random adventure - we found Errol Flynn’s old house and jumped the fence and just went exploring. Someone called the cops and the helicopter came out. We ran like heck and were able to get away before getting caught.
_Feral_Child@reddit
I didn't document that shit then, I'm sure as fuck not documenting now...
Economy_Care1322@reddit
He had a notepad with dates, mileage, gallons. It was fun.
BigBri0011@reddit
Statute of limitations means I can talk about most of the dumb/funny/cool shit I did back in the day. lol
Rygaaar@reddit
Ahhh that shit is ancient history, nobody cares. Just fun to look back through the lens of “what an asshole I was” and share it with some fellow oldies. And there’s that whole statute of limitations thing.
Right on. Good times. Cool beans. Damn the man. 🤘🖕
heybucket459@reddit
Only the goofy dumb shit but no pics haha!
I’m with you, not saying anything about any of the actual crazy stuff!
Grease2feminist@reddit
And others weren’t recording us constantly. Government or our peers. Polaroid maaaaybe.
Chemical_Author7880@reddit
This is the most GenX reply ever and I feel the same way!
raoul_bukowski@reddit
Built something from the anarchist cookbook that was supposed to be a smoke bomb but turned into something else because I packed it a little too tightly..
Tamatajuice@reddit
Used to flip mailboxes upside down. Wouldn’t take anything. Just put them upside down.
Many-Role-4271@reddit
As a 6 year old I had a genius idea. I decided to catch a car. On my walk home from school there was an old barbed wire fence. I unwound the wire and stretched it across the road and the created a lever to raise the wire with the old fence posts. I caught a yellow VW Beetle. The driver seemed very angry and dragged me home to my parents mostly by my ear. They got to pay for a new paint job…..but I caught a car.
eg143@reddit
I caught one too by building a speed bump out of small boulders lined up across the road and covering them with dirt. I lived off a gravel road in the backwoods of Virginia. A man came around the corner in an old truck and it stopped his tires and he couldn’t drive over it. He yelled profanities at us and pushed his way through somehow. Luckily it didn’t damage his tires and my parents never found out.
Drillerfan@reddit
Delinquent is a minor who commits a crime. A status offender is one who's offense is illegal only because of their age. Curfew, alcohol possession etc. Just want to make that distinction.
Economy_Care1322@reddit
I’d add a cup or so of gas to my neighbor’s car every night for months. He commuted to NYC and tracked his mileage closely. He was puzzled how his mileage got better.
The dealership wanted him to bring it in and see what was going on. He swore they’d reset it and put the bad mileage back. He sounded crazy. It was innocent enough.
Dry-Ad-2197@reddit
Wait this is like a reverse crime
Ex-PFC_WintergreenV4@reddit
My friend’s little brother’s buddies stole a pickup truck load of golf balls from the driving range and dumped them on the road at the top of a hill
BigBri0011@reddit
HA!! Back in the day, we stole 3 boxes of plastic forks from Wendy's one night. About 3am, we stuck all 3000 forks in the front lawn of someone we didn't like.
Did the same with popcorn a year or so later. A buddy worked at the movie theater, so that was super easy to get. Were a LOT of fat squirrels and raccoons in that neighborhood that summer.
Ok-Yogurtcloset-9183@reddit
I cannot believe I had to scroll this far (through a lot of great stories) to find a lawn forking 🤘Nice work!
overmonk@reddit
A relatively harmless one. My sister was a couple years older and we got a car when I was old enough to drive - a 1977 Volvo 240 sedan, beige, 4spd w/overdrive. This was in 1987. I discovered that the windshield washer nozzles could be easily positioned so they would spray pedestrians and they did a lot of it.
Ok-Yogurtcloset-9183@reddit
In ‘88, got my license and an ‘81 240 🤘
Over-Cod1796@reddit
Giggled at the washer action.
VisualBasic@reddit
I pirated literally thousands of Commodore 64 and Amiga games back in the 80s. I regret nothing!
SuspiciousChicken@reddit
How!? Weren't they all cartridges? Well beyond my ability to clone at the time (and still).
VisualBasic@reddit
We had these things called “floppy disks” back in those days. If you had the right software, you could make a perfect copy of a game disk and play it on your computer.
CarpeBurger@reddit
I’m cracking up! Did you run a BBS? I miss the WaReZ and CrAcKz boards sooooo much. The demo disc for Quake had THE FULL GAME ON IT!
VisualBasic@reddit
Alas, I did not have my own BBS but I did frequent a few in my area. My modem was only 1200 baud so downloading ill-gotten booty was beyond my means. Avast!
SuspiciousChicken@reddit
Ah, right! Had to refresh my memory - the Commodore was a computer, not a game console like Atari or Coleco, etc.
Commodores had those games like Wizard of Wor!
Thanks, I get how one could copy a floppy
Deer-in-Motion@reddit
Rode a Honda scooter in high school without a license or insurance for about 6 months before getting a better scooter and my learner's permit, but still no insurance.
Fulghn@reddit
I believe there are laws which protect me from self-incinceration.
I know my farging rights!
Ok-Yogurtcloset-9183@reddit
You bastages!
HappyRedditorOnline@reddit
The statute of limitations may not be up yet. I think I’ll wait.
skbugco@reddit
Pretty sure stealing the plate off a state patrol car parked at the officers home, using your dog tags as a screwdriver is multiple crimes. So no, I got nothing.
DooDooCat@reddit
Mooning the math teacher in the middle of the night. Putting the football coach’s MG Midget on the roof of a portable. Sunrise keggers with dozens of glazed donuts. Kept a bottle of Early Times whiskey in my locker for sipping between classes.
skbugco@reddit
My people right here.
mermaid619@reddit
We got chased out of a park by a cop car and when they caught up with us in a white hen parking lot, I was congratulated on “keeping up the rear”
DuckyDoodleDandy@reddit
What is a white hen parking lot?
mermaid619@reddit
White Hen Pantry was a glorious bastion of convenience and sandwiches in the northeast.
JimmyCYa@reddit
Rawdog shitting inside the basements of houses under construction. Probably more of a lowjink.
MakeMuffinsNotWar@reddit
Lowjink! ☠️
HistoricalTowel1127@reddit
Crimes don’t count? Is that crimes against humanity, society, god, or public decency? Surely you don’t mean all crimes.
buck_09@reddit
So many to list, and so many that have already been mentioned.
Buying cap guns and driving with friend down our section of US highway, then pointing them at other drivers while stopped at red lights and blasting away.
Probably not the smartest thing to do, but we scared the shit out of so many people. My friend also had a car that looked like a police detectives car, and we had a red strobe that plugged into the cigarette lighter. We'd pull people over, come up behind them and then pull away mooning them and flipping the bird.
Bought about 2 dozen little plastic army men with parachutes and threw them over the top rail of our local mall center common area.
amazon_john75@reddit
That was me. WAY late bloomer here 😂
well-it-was-rubbish@reddit
A rectangle.
veganguy75@reddit
In college, we had a huge enclosed spiral staircase in the middle of our dorms. My roommates and I would fill and seal a gallon zip lock with all the horrible food our parents gave us that we didn't want, center it, and bombs away! But we waited until about 2 AM to do it. That stuff splattered everywhere and was hilarious tobus at the time! I feel like such a jerk now, but I do remember getting up early, seeing them clean it, and asking, "Oh wow, what happened? Did somebody puke?"
One time, we waited forever for people to walk down so we could get an actual person or people. I skewed my drop slightly left to hit the handrail, and wow! Splat, then a "MF, I'm gunna kick your a--" and we ran for our lives. Literally!
Anyway, we never got caught. There were many investigations, but they couldn't prove it was us. No cameras. And us GenX'rs knew that snitches get stitches.
Jonny4900@reddit
I mixed different genre Lego sets together. Used model glue in under-ventilated rooms. Played D&D during the Satanic Panic years.
That’s about it, I am a nerd.
WNJohnnyM@reddit
Whoa! Whoa!
Mixed Lego sets? You should've been sent to prison for that!
Jonny4900@reddit
I know right? I was a rebel with tiny plastic pieces.
WNJohnnyM@reddit
Sheesh!
Latchkey_kid95@reddit
Smash pumpkins
RoxyTyn@reddit
Helped liberate a Ronald McDonald statue.
LetSubstantial1763@reddit
We may need more details on how this was achieved!!
RoxyTyn@reddit
It involved sawing Ronald off at the ankles and then lifting him off the metal rods that ran up his legs. We then made him comfortable in the bed of a pick-up and gave him beer and cigs on the way to our school''s football field, where we deposited him. (We were hoping to put him on the front lawn but it was too well lit )
LetSubstantial1763@reddit
Fantastic achievement!!! Great story. Thank you for elaborating.
How heavy do you think Ronald was?
RoxyTyn@reddit
I don't know. It took three guys to get him in + out of the truck. Maybe 5 to lift him off the poles.
Paprika420@reddit
Everything I wanna talk about can be considered an “actual crime “.
AbrasiveFingaBang@reddit
Yep!🤣
Free-Skill5227@reddit
🤣🤣 same
Ich_Bin_Wolfgang@reddit
I worked at a gas station overnight while I was finishing grad school. I smoked so damn much weed restocking that beer cooler.
Icy_Hovercraft_7050@reddit
Got into a "war" with the garbage men one summer. Eggs, fireworks, and a car battery wired to the garbage. We were bad.
Masters_domme@reddit
I would love to know how they retaliated 😆
StereotypicallBarbie@reddit
Had a night job in the local off licence when I was 16.. the other girl I worked with was only in her very early 20’s at most! and we would just smoke weed out the back door all night.. the 90’s were a different time!
How that owner trusted us to lock up and take cash home every night was insane.
Masters_domme@reddit
What is an “off licence” in this context?
StereotypicallBarbie@reddit
Erm.. a small shop that sells mostly alcohol, snacks and cigarettes! A popular chain of them in the UK was called booze busters!
If you’re in the US I think liquor stores are the equivalent.
Masters_domme@reddit
Ah. That makes sense. Thanks!
RavioliContingency@reddit
Stole a LOT of Xmas lawn ornaments and still feel bad.
RedSparrow1971@reddit
I left a used tampon on the baby Jesus once 😱 I was very drunk
RavioliContingency@reddit
Ok I’m telling
Armadillo-Overall@reddit
I got promoted because my boss got caught smoking weed.... that I sold to him. Never was narc'd on.
backAtItForInsanity@reddit
We lived in bfe Michigan near Silver Lake Sand Dunes. After our junior prom, my date was my ex-boyfriend because that's how we rolled, and our best friends, we left tiny Shelby and went up to the dunes. Alcohol and pot may have been involved, but we decided to climb the dunes in our formals. Then we went out to Little Sauble Point, where more alcohol and pot was involved, and danced in the water by moonlight. Me and my ex got back together because it really was meant to be in the moment. I don't have a lot of fond memories from my childhood, but this one i hold onto tightly.
Sonny_1313@reddit
Nice try narc.
AcrobaticTrouble3563@reddit
🤣🤣🤣
Princess_Jade1974@reddit
It wasn’t uncommon to break into your friend’s house when they weren’t home XD
deedeejayzee@reddit
And steal their parents liquor, lol. Maybe, just my town?
Princess_Jade1974@reddit
I played with their toys, I wasn’t that rebellious XD
mermaid619@reddit
Cops picked us up from a “party” and dropped us off at the top of the street so we wouldn’t get in trouble (1998)
SithAccountant@reddit
We collected old Xmas trees once they were put out by the curb in a couple of trucks and planted a forest on our friend’s lawn. His parents were not huge fans of our work.
TNTmom4@reddit
Did this every year! We also TP houses, went geffing ( filling old fire extinguishers with water). Then would have water wars with other kids while driving up and down PCH.
ImInBeastmodeOG@reddit
It's hard to remember past the "crimes" and the line of just kids being kids began. For instance, nobody told us NOT to go in the school on a weekend through the open window and just run around like The Breakfast Club. A janitor started chasing us but we got away thanks to him not knowing the rule about cardio.
Tame 80s shit, you probably did the same. I can't talk about the other stuff as my son will find this account when I die. We also had a case of the beast in the trunk at all times.
Yabbajonk@reddit
I’m not your dancing monkey.
dont_know_where_im_g@reddit
We played ghosts in the graveyard in the graveyard.
OraDr8@reddit
We loosened a couple of fence palings at the local Maccas so we could sneak into the outdoor play area at night and drink and hang out.
EveryExplanation8084@reddit
I didn’t throw bowling balls off of high places but we lived on the 36th floor in Waikiki and we threw water balloons and Oreo cookies 😂
AirportNo3058@reddit
In college we would put random things in the vat of liquid nitrogen..... Like dead mice or our sandwiches wrapped in plastic wrap and then we would run to the top of the science building and hurl them off and then run down to see the shards... Nerd hijinks
RedSparrow1971@reddit
Had a friend with the most unpleasant, cops calling neighbors. Her poor mother liked to listen to the radio while she made dinner after she came home from work. They had no ac, so the kitchen window would be open when it was hot and the cops would show up, hats in hand, begging forgiveness again for having to do their jobs and ask her to turn the radio down, even though they couldn’t hear it. They called the cops for everything Then I met someone whose dad had an old, no motor style push mower. I asked to borrow it. We mowed a swastika into the neighbors lawn. (We did geometry and a couple of tests in other peoples back yards for this) They moved out within a month. I don’t feel good about it, but I don’t exactly feel bad about it, either- the neighborhood was clearly going to hell in a hand basket.
AirportNo3058@reddit
Climbed the local tennis bubble, bounced along the top. Getting down was much harder than getting up.
Future_Inspector6645@reddit
We would climb up on our neighbors’ roofs and smoke cigarettes. Sometimes we would break into their houses and just chill. We NEVER stole anything. We just would snoop. Sooooo bad I know. 😬😬😬
FlatulousStanko@reddit
Fill up shopping carts at the grocery store or a Walmart (non- perishable goods) and leave them in the aisle.
niff007@reddit
Most my worst hijinks were in HS. By age 24 I had 4 jobs. Fishbowling the gondola was always fun.
SuckerEMC@reddit
Technically a crime, but I’m counting on the statute of limitations… we’d drive around and steal yard art out of people’s yards- spinning daisies, statuary, pink flamingos, etc. We’d stash it in the woods near the home of one of us over the course of several weekends ‘til we had a sizable collection. Then we’d haul it all to the yard of a nemesis or someone with a birthday and set it up. We thought we were artists…
niff007@reddit
Totally did this in HS. My buddy had a giant boat of a car and the large trunk was filled. We did it to each other too. God forbid anyone in our friend group go on vacation with their family. Haha
Not_High_Maintenance@reddit
Our Senior Prank was stealing hundreds of yard signs and staging them in the yard of our high school. Simpler times. Really good times.
Tippity2@reddit
And some poor old lady went without butter for weeks to save up for a $10 piece of yard art….that you stole because you thought it was funny.
Dude, what goes around comes around. 😂
gordonthecole@reddit
Got up on the roofs of one story office buildings.
Not_High_Maintenance@reddit
Playing tag in the mall.
We thought we were hot shit. 💩
sfdsquid@reddit
One of the most fun things we did was take the kitchen boombox broke at the Mexican restaurant where I worked up the fire escape to the roof of the building and drop it.
But the best thing ever was sneaking out of the dorms in boarding school and breaking into the school's radio studio and doing a short pirate radio broadcast. I think the 3 of us played a couple songs each before we got too squirrelly and crept back to the dorms.
Another boarding school thing - smoking in the woods - we had a whistle signal. When you heard someone coming you'd do the whistle and if they didn't respond correctly you knew you had to put em out and act casual.
Not_High_Maintenance@reddit
Most Americans can’t fathom boarding school.
thejeffroc@reddit
We would go out trash night after 11pm. Grab a trash can while hanging out the window of our car and get going like 30 or 40mph. Then just let it go...
jobu_needs_refill@reddit
Same. We usually grabbed one with wheels but occasionally we'd snatch a metal can and watch the sparks fly.
TurdMcDirk@reddit
Egged our junior high’s math teacher’s house.
We’d move road closed signs to the middle of the road and egg cars when they’d stop.
We wrapped our friend’s house and he said his dad knew it was some other guys because they have a bad ass surveillance system. They didn’t have a surveillance system. It was the late 80’s.
When we were 12 we used peep at my buddy’s MILF neighbor sunbathe at her pool nude. We used to call her black crow because of her bush. It was the 80’s and everyone had a bush.
And we got in so many fights over skate and surf spots we considered ours.
The list goes on.
PublicRepublic1149@reddit
Hunted each other with bb guns
isla_is@reddit
Yep. BB gun fights on the beach and in the back woods.
PublicRepublic1149@reddit
We were in the woods
Tatsuwashi@reddit
My buddy had a huge Impala and a volunteer firefighter blue roof light. We used to pull people over at night because it looked like big blocky cop headlights from behind. When they pulled over, we would drive by laughing and take off.
lgallagher24@reddit
Fireworks. Golf cart racing (lived near a country club). Taking the garage door opener, driving thru the neighborhood and clicking to see whose garage door opened at 130 am
TheBariSax@reddit
I grew up before social media. I ain't sayin' a word.
OkCommunication5446@reddit
There's just some shit we don't say out loud.
DogLady1722@reddit
Can’t. Prove. Anything…
deedeejayzee@reddit
In my neighborhood we would go garage hopping and see how many cops we could get to chase us
Grouchy_Land895@reddit
Too many to tell. I was wild. One is that someone was having a party at a hotel when I was 17. I decided it would be a good idea to grab a fire extinguisher and spray the room. The hotel got my name from someone and they called my parents the next day. I had to work off paying $500 to clean it up and a new TV. Good times…lol.
lasims79@reddit
I snuck out every single weekend for a year before I got caught. It snowed a little bit before I returned home one night and my dad saw the footprints leading to my window.
ShadowBitch42@reddit
Car surfing. I was the driver (I was probably the least irresponsible choice, since it was also my (parents’s) car) and various passengers would take turns riding short distances on the hood in a surfing pose (as best we could approximate, in a very land-locked state). I went very slow and no one was injured but we had a new near misses when other traffic appeared on the backroad.
In case you’re picturing teenage boys… it was all girls. Stupidity is not (only) sex-linked.
frozenswampmonster@reddit
Glad you drove slow. Hopefully not intoxicated. Unfortunately I know of a couple of incidents of car surfing that led to fatalities.
ShadowBitch42@reddit
Not intoxicated. Horrified in hindsight. I apologize for bringing up bad memories.
frozenswampmonster@reddit
No need to apologize!
DaddyOhMy@reddit
My friend's dad was a chemist. He got us a foaming agent which we mixed with some dishwashing soap in a soda cup. Then we sat by the fountain in the mall and "accidentally" knocked it over into the water. As we walked away (taking the now empty cup with us) the fountain stopped. Then a few seconds later it gave out a loud glug and spewed bubbles everywhere. We didn't stick around to watch but the next day at school we heard from other kids how spectacular it was.
Another time I was in a different mall with my mom and she mentioned how nice one of the fake trees looked. So I went over, pulled it out of the fake planter it was in, and started walking tomthe door with it. My mom started laughing, thinking I was going to put it back but I just kept walking with it (in my family, you commit to the bit!). My mom was laughing hysterically as we approached the door and finally remembered which car we had driven. She told me to put it back because it wouldn't fit.
DawnInDesMoines@reddit
My friend (F) got up on the “cool kids table” outside at high school wearing a denim mini- took off her panties and peed all over it. (This was after hours of course)
Kevin_Turvey@reddit
Ridiculous dork punk teen-in-the-'80s stuff. Just trying crazy things to make noise.
Breaking into playgrounds, fruit stands, rooftops, "employees only" areas everywhere. It was just fun to open doors and walk into places we weren't supposed to be. Walking around in the dead of night, rearranging letters on signs, climbing billboards, messing with lawn ornaments.
Chasing each other around the mall with squirt guns, yelling nonsense. Minor graffiti. Crank calls. Giving wrong directions to people who seemed like jerks. Going barefoot inappropriately. Yelling "pistachio!" every time we saw that color.
Pretty good memories actually.
Great-Bug-736@reddit
Bumper skiing in the winter.
Red coolaid in the washer solvent tank, drivers side hose pinched off, passenger side bent towards the curb.
Soaped windows, tee peed, Vaseline on the windshield wipers.
Water ballooning cars.
Using sn old fishing rod to throw apples and tomatoes at cars.
Underage drinking (14).
Bought a trunk load of bowling balls and rolled them down a city street hill.
There are a BUNCH more but I forget them all.
WordNational3013@reddit
Hey trouble!
No_Salt5374@reddit
Took my mom's car out at night. Cruising around,no license. Got extra cocky one time ran out of gas, that was the end of that. Sneaking in the community pool after hours, we had no ac. Ding dong ditch, egged/snowballed cars,chased by cops. Good times
WordNational3013@reddit
We snuck into the community pool too!
BnCtrKiki@reddit
Sorry, I think mine were actual crimes, victimless ones, but still crimes. I drove every car like I stole it.
-Mos_Eisley-@reddit
Yep, pretty much this. Got a ticket for 60 in a school zone when I was 17 ;)
Izmeralda@reddit
My friend group all had cb radios in our cars. We used to play hide and seek using the cb. The "seekers" used the strength of the signal to find the "hider" and we had boundaries so the "hider" stayed within a particular area. The hider had to key up and speak (or laugh, or whatever) for 2 seconds every 30 seconds. There wasn't a rule for the seekers to key up, but they all had to get their digs in. The seeker had to be on the same street and within a half of a block to "find" a hider. Our blocks had an alleyway that ran the length of the block in-between the backyards of the houses, with some driveways. There were some driveways off the streets too, so lots of good hide spots. The first seeker to find the hider was the winner. There were 4 of us with cars, and the rest of our friends would ride along, so we usually had 1 hider and three seekers.
Thanks for this post, I haven't thought about this in ages. Such good memories.
Eureecka@reddit
We did this too! CB tag was the best! Especially in the fall when we could cut across the fields (after farmer harvested).
AntheaBrainhooke@reddit
Nothing. I was a boring little goody two-shoes.
kiffiekat@reddit
A percentage of the price of a tape went to royalty holders, paid by the manufacturers. They anticipated people recording songs off the radio and made provisions for it.
Royal_Thrashing@reddit
Seriously?!?!?
I'm too lazy to look this up right now.
AntheaBrainhooke@reddit
Actually now it's been mentioned I do remember hearing about this. I thought it was bogus then and I still think it's bogus now.
kiffiekat@reddit
Not bogus. It's pretty involved though. I'm glad I'm not in the business.
AntheaBrainhooke@reddit
I meant bogus as in bad but I see how that would be unclear! My bad! 😂
kiffiekat@reddit
Yeah, I read about it years ago, but I don't remember which rabbit hole I was in at the time.
jmymac@reddit
A real criminal mastermind would have checked out cassettes from the library and copied em straight to a freshly unwrapped TDK 90 minute tape.
Hypothetically.
rthrouw1234@reddit
Wow that brings me back hard
ClarenceWalnuts99@reddit
I’m not fessing up to anything, too many things were too close to not being legal!! 🤣🤣
uberphaser@reddit
Laye 80s/early 90s, we used to make jellied gasoline in the old abandoned ww2 federal ammo depot next to the state park in my town, and have HUGE bonfires. There was a massive airstrip in the middle of it with no trees around so we couldn't burn down the forest...like some assholes did a few years after we graduated, ruining it for everyone. Boo.
The bunker parties we used to throw were EPIC. we'd get everyone to rally at the park gate then lead everyone with flashlights through the cut fence to these massive empty concrete quonset hut things. You could put a crappy boom box in there and it sounded like the craziest rave.
Back then it wasn't patrolled and it was so far from anyone that no noise complaints were ever made.
We also made sure to look out for each other bc we knew all it would take was one accident and wed all be fucked. We made it through somehow...
BallisticHabit@reddit
Jellied gas is terrifying. Styrofoam worked well for that.
kangadac@reddit
Pretty much napalm at that point, no?
uberphaser@reddit
Napalm is a specific type of jellied gasoline developed as a weapon, whereas "jellied gasoline" is the general term for gasoline thickened into a gel. Napalm uses specific additives (originally aluminum soaps of naphthenic and palmitic acids) to make gasoline stick to targets and burn longer at higher temperatures.
uberphaser@reddit
Thats what we used.
zootnotdingo@reddit
Truck surfing on winding backroads
Fuzzteam7@reddit
I put a tape outline of a man on the front of a city snow plow (like an old fashioned crime scene).
DogLady1722@reddit
🤣🤣🤣
obviousthrowaway038@reddit
Hood surfing.
ohitsjeffagain@reddit
Acquired a big chrome fire extinguisher (you know the one) and would spray innocents with water from our car . Sometimes people on the block or people in their cars if you wanted a chase. You could refill it at any gas station just water and compressed air
dmcdd@reddit
Did you know if you filled those with beer and more than a few pounds of pressure they would make beer squirt out your nose?
ohitsjeffagain@reddit
Didn’t try that but I still have it!
ohitsjeffagain@reddit
The original super soaker lol
theShpydar@reddit
Heh, we did basiclly the same thing in the early 90s, but with super soakers! One time a lady got wicked pissed and chased us in her minivan until I did some offroad driving to get away, and then turned directly on to a street where there was a cop getting in his car. Suffice it to say he immediately followed us and we got pulled over. Thankfully just ended up with a "driving on the sidewalk" ticket. 😆
Random0s2oh@reddit
I'm glad you little shits thought it was so funny. To this day my kids still talk about being able to tell my mood while driving by how horizontal my air freshener is reaching.
For the record. I have 0 road rage incidents since my late 30's and I drive like the proper grandmother I am now.
ohitsjeffagain@reddit
I got a sailor and his girl in a jeep and like to never got away, he could hear my loud pipes and we were trapped in a neighborhood. Got away by getting a turn or two ahead then going super slow and quiet. Good times
Mr_Brymo@reddit
We would steal lawn ornaments from the mobile home park and stack them on our vice principal‘s lawn in an attempt to get our deeds in the crime beat of our local paper.
Electrical-Stable498@reddit
And they say nothing happens in Sebastopol…
EntertainerNo4509@reddit
We got into our local police beat back in the 80s by smashing pumpkins on a Halloween night of hijinks.
No-Swan2204@reddit
I made a Molotov cocktail and exploded it in our back yard when I was 12.
Only_Arachnid1841@reddit
I removed the “L” in the Department of Public Works sign on the side of the building and moved the letters together properly. Was that way for a couple of months.
Bellebarks2@reddit
lol. Reminds me of this restaurant in our neighborhood. It was called Angus Steakhouse. And the sign was made of large metal letters. Not us, but someone was always stealing the G. They replaced it multiple times but it wouldn’t last a week. They finally just painted on the G. It looked weird, but I guess they were just done being Anus Steakhouse.
Bellebarks2@reddit
My grandfather kept his Buick clunker parked in the driveway. We stole that car so many nights. It was such a tank, if we hit something it wouldn’t leave a scratch. One night it started raining a little and when I turned on the wipers, only one had the rubber blade, the other one was just metal scraping the glass. I had to do something because the noise was unbearable and it would have scratched the windshield. So I pulled over and got out and just bent the offending wiper into a 90 degree angle away from the glass. If you can try to picture it, it kinda looked like the car was waving hello. So, when we passed other cars someone would say in a funny voice, something like, “well hello there. How do you do?” I laughed so hard I wet my pants.
The next morning my grandfather was not amused that someone vandalized his car and destroyed one of the windshield wipers. I’m fairly sure he knew it was me and my band of idiots, but he never accused me.
Junior_Ad_3301@reddit
About once a month the local pigs would find our gathering place, take our beer, line us up and read our names off of the stack of driver's licenses and student id cards. They then sent us on our way after they picked the soberest looking kid. We actually ran from the sheriffs once. That one was a bad move for 2 of us who were snagged, but nothing much came of it. Early 90s.
Wooden_Honey_4427@reddit
I just torchered my teachers! Placing a condom with mayo in her book. Stealing the box she propped her leg on n that was used to cover her vent since she kept us freezing. Id break em down n hide em every morning. She was horrible tho. My favorite was when I stole her wheelchair...which she did not need...even told me so..me and a buddy switched up hidding it in locker rooms n bathrooms for 3 months b4 she finally found it. 😆 🤣
Wise-Homework5480@reddit
Torchered? You mean tortured.
FloppyFerrett1@reddit
LoL seriously! Stay in school kids!
Wooden_Honey_4427@reddit
Kinda funny it was my English teacher tho so 😆 🤣 😂
Wooden_Honey_4427@reddit
😆 omg auto correct is an enemy 😆
jaydrian@reddit
Lots of sneaking out, parties, ditching school, taking off to check out the cities like Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Venice Beach. Just fun shenanigans!
vinegar_strokes68@reddit
One, two, three, four....FIFTH!
xt0rt@reddit
One time for the freedom of speeches (Speeches)
Two time for the right to hold heaters (Heaters)
Just skip to the fifth if the cops in your house
Close your mouth and pray to your Jesus (Jesus)
Most-Silver-4365@reddit
Hmm 🤔, no that was a crime, and that was a crime, that too. I've got nothing to say.
Ih8TB12@reddit
Disconnect the speedometer on my friends truck so he couldn't see how many miles were out on it in a night. Went wherever we wanted. Terrorize people by throwing water balloons at them. Our guy friends would be laying in back and pop up and throw. We used smaller ones so they didn't hurt - you just got wet. There were multiple trucks of that color so we put mud over the license plate so people couldn't report us. We were fucking idiots.
HereIAmAgain73@reddit
TP houses (my Dad drove & taught us), I was DD for my friends that were of age when we went to parties after working late shift, sneaking out to meet friends for after work chill at local restaurant, crank calls “is your fridge running?”, make out point with high school crush
Lilredh4iredgrl@reddit
Almost died of alcohol poisoning in several cow fields.
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
A friend of mine got a laced joint and died in the hospital, was brought back and now he's a ghost hunter.
Inner_Republic6810@reddit
You’re a fellow Wisconsinite?
Lilredh4iredgrl@reddit
Tennessee but we all did this is think 🤣
dmcdd@reddit
I think that happens world wide.
BigBri0011@reddit
No cow fields, but a freidnd's parents owned a christmas tree farm. Had some ragers there. lol
montana77@reddit
Same
lacatro1@reddit
Same.
hernios@reddit
We all played on the train tracks
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
I once set off a homemade firecracker on the tracks behind my highschool. Later found out that was a felony.
nerfherded@reddit
GenX famously doesn't brag about their exploits, especially in writing. "Snitches get stitches" and all that.
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
I'm not wild about thinking in terms of generations, but we were the last to grow up without the internet.
And from what I see of the replies to this thread, GenX LOVES talking about the crimes they committed in their youth.
I'd rather hear that than putting down the younger generations.
user86753092@reddit
I suppose it is actually a crime, but we felt it a harmless prank in the days before ring cameras, rearranging lawn ornaments in the neighborhood.
In the early 2000s, a pair of teens were actually stealing and collecting them in someone’s back yard. They got in minor trouble, the neighbors were happy to get their lawn gnomes and lions back.
deleted_by_reddit@reddit
[removed]
GenX-ModTeam@reddit
{community_rule_2}
GortLovesYou@reddit
Pool hopping. I grew up in Florida, and my friends and I could walk from the beach to private hotel swimming pools. Hotels required swimmers to wear bracelets identifying them as paying guests, but most pools were so crowded in the summers that none of the lifeguards or bartenders would notice, or, if they did, they rarely cared enough to kick us out. And if some true believer middle manager did kick us out, we'd just go to the hotel pool next door. This is why it's called pool hopping.
Mangolandia@reddit
I may or may not have sneaked into hotel pools by walking myself confidently from the beach like I was a guest!
GortLovesYou@reddit
Confidence that's the secret.
Mangolandia@reddit
It didn’t hurt to be in a bikini, probably (though by Florida standards I was decidedly underwhelming, lol)
Suspicious-Earth-648@reddit
Fireworks always seemed to be available to me which is really surprising since I live in CA. Other than that, the usual: taping the streets with duct tape, waterballooning cars, ordering pizzas to my crush, turning off our neighbors power at the breaker, shoplifting for the sake of it, starting fires to see what happened, breaking into the school just to name a few…. None of it was good lol
atxgossiphound@reddit
I have it on very good authority that you have just described life in Merced in the late 80s to a T. There were also egg fights on Halloween.
pborg312@reddit
I plead the fifth. We never got caught but we did a LOT in the early 80's.
artizin@reddit
Yep, can attest. Won’t say what we did, because i got away with a lot.
BallisticHabit@reddit
So fucking glad smartphones weren't a thing then, cause we put together some sketchy shit.
Did you know that a spud gun can be surpressed surprisingly well?
Accurate_Weather_211@reddit
Right? Snitches get stitches 😂🫨😂
huevosyhuevos@reddit
We used to cook huge meals and distribute them to homeless camps in the winter. It started because my youth pastor was violently against helping them so we assumed it was the right thing to do. Honestly it was mostly just a way to embrace anti authoritarianism and anarchy. Im not sure if we actually cared as much about helping them as we did telling the church to eat a bag. Anyway, I think it’s actually a crime now. Also we did a lot of crime.
yanknga@reddit
Your pastor was against helping them? Were you a southern Baptist by chance?
KrazyKatLady1674@reddit
I stole a construction barrel, you know the big orange one, cuz I wanted the flashing light on top. We took off with it, took the light off, and abandoned the barrel in a ditch. My dad found the light in my room, I had to fess up, and he took the light away. Not the worst thing ever but yeah, stupid teenager stuff.
yanknga@reddit
I did the same thing. The light blinked non stop for weeks. Some guy came to our house and asked my mother if she’d seen the barrel or flashing light which she hadn’t because I buried it in a box in my closet under a bunch of winter clothes. Once the battery died. I dropped it back off at the construction one night when I snuck out.
SavoirFaire2Middling@reddit
When we stole one, my friend discovered that there was a small hole in the back of the battery box that you could poke something into, which would turn the light off and on. That way the battery lasted for years.
yanknga@reddit
Damn. You’re 45 years too late telling me that. Next time I’ll know though.
Alman54@reddit
So THAT'S the secret to turning one of those off. Wish I knew that in 1987.
KrazyKatLady1674@reddit
Yes, imagine my surprise when I found out that that damn light was solar activated. I turned the lights off in my room and the place lit up!!! I had to hide mine in the closet too but my dad still found it. Lol. I don't know what he did with it. I've never asked. Lol
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
When I was 18, my parents were gone for a couple weeks on a cruise.
There was construction in the area and they had concrete dividers, so someone welded up some metal sign posts to create a saddle that sat on top of the concrete dividers, with a blinking construction light mounted to the top. Meaning that they were not attached, just heavy.
By the end of the week I had about 10 of those blinking lights in our living room, all out of sync and blinking.
I know I kept one for a couple years, I have no idea what I did with the rest.
KrazyKatLady1674@reddit
Spectacular!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
runkittygogogo@reddit
On one day when I was eight we jumped bikes over burning phone books, rolled grocer carts down some stairs, hit a car with a plumb, and ate a whole bunch of bananas because our babysitter wanted to smoke the peels.
CelebrationOk4140@reddit
All in the same day??
runkittygogogo@reddit
Same day! He didn't last as our babysitter.
Alman54@reddit
The banana peel thing turned out to be a hoax, as I found out a few years after trying it.
runkittygogogo@reddit
It seemed ridiculous at the time even to an eight year old.
RoxyTyn@reddit
A girl got my best friend fired from her job so we wrote "bitch" on her family's front lawn with plant poison.
kittyshakedown@reddit
Oh no.
Caveat is that everything turned out just fine and I live a life I never imagined.
I (F) was incredibly promiscuous. Thank you to whoever I didn’t get pregnant or worse.
There were many many other things but that was one of the highlights. I got into so much trouble in those 3 - 4 hours before my parents got home from work.
No cell phones was key.
I have teenagers and can tell you where exactly they are at anytime hundreds of miles away.
But they don’t like going to the end of driveway alone at night, they are always at home it seems…so different than my days.
CharmingDagger@reddit
There was a girl in high school that wasn't conventionally attractive (I thought she was cute) who in sophomore year got a reputation for giving bj's to the popular boys. They of course treated her like garbage. I hope she's doing okay.
kittyshakedown@reddit
She’s probably ok. She wasn’t the only one.
Even though this reads like one of the Sweet Valley High storylines.
CharmingDagger@reddit
I was somewhat jealous of the girls and boys that were having sex. You were all having more fun than I was. 😂
kiffiekat@reddit
...and here was I, not even remotely interested in sex until I was a senior, just kind of enjoying the angst of a crush on someone I had no chance with.
nite_skye_@reddit
It’s weird, isn’t it? I’m oldest GenX and had my kids young. They are grown now. But as teens they just never thought up doing anything like we did. And we weren’t the exception to the rule. Most kids in my area were out doing crazy things. I did tell my kids that there was nothing they could possibly do that I wouldn’t know what they were up to doing. And the handful of times I ever told them a story (about when I was 9 or 10) they would be shocked. I’m not complaining. It just seems weird to me.
My kids are parents now to young teens. The kids are all so well behaved and I don’t think it would occur to them to do the things we did. The biggest complaint I see in Nextdoor is ppl complaining about kids knocking and running. A couple of years ago it was also the “koolaid” challenge where you bust through a vinyl fence panel like the commercial. Annoying yes. Criminal…barely.
kittyshakedown@reddit
Right! The things I did. I disappeared for a few days when I was 15!!!!! To go with some friends to a Grateful Dead concert states away. My parents finally sent a 911 to MY PAGER (lol) to say they were going to call the police. I had to find a pay phone and call them collect to let them know I was alive and ok. I literally left with the clothes I had on and zero cash.
My kids get stressed out taking a flight on vacation with me and their dad right there.
bigpilague@reddit
I peed out of the back of a fast moving truck.
atx78701@reddit
Blew up mailboxes with m80s
We lived on a lake and one year there were baby frogs swarming every where. Did cruel things to them which I regret
Egged houses
Once wrote fuck you in someone's yard using fertilizer. It didn't appear for weeks as the grass died from too much fertilizer
Got the idea when I dropped too much fertilizer on a spot and killed the grass there
ChickChocoIceCreCro@reddit
Running through the cemetery naked
Regular-Cheesecake2@reddit
Beer runs
Over_Table3898@reddit
B double e double r u n -
YinzerChick70@reddit
Nice try, Mom
Owlthirtynow@reddit
My friends and I blew things up with M80s. My best friend’s uncle was from Canada and always brought them down for her. We would wet our pants laughing and her mom would come outside saying “I know you two did something bad”!
ManagementIll4603@reddit
graffiti.
SergeantBeavis@reddit
Not today FBI.
jackssweetheart@reddit
Trespassing. Lots. I love it. I haven’t done it in 10 years, but would, if given the right circumstances!
mistlet0ad@reddit
Our friend group used to ride up old dirt roads, build fires, and drink for hours. Can't do that anymore because DNR will light your ass up.
BubbetteGA@reddit
Small town shenanigans…swimming at the rock quarry, egg procurement (our grocery store had a policy of not selling eggs to males after sunset, but would sell dozens to a girl), bonfires in the woods, and shooting fireworks off the cliff over the major highway into town as cars drove by.
DaisyMaeMiller1984@reddit
Going to the cemetery to get drunk
pumpkindonut123@reddit
Yup and my friends left me in the car while they walked off into the graveyard to have sex. All I had was a large flashlight and I sat in the car while a million bugs swarmed me which was equally as bad as being left alone in a car at the cemetery at night.
DaisyMaeMiller1984@reddit
I did that too. It's a very fond memory
pumpkindonut123@reddit
😂
exitpursuedbybear@reddit
I am not sure about statute of limitations so I refer to the 5th amendment and right against self incrimination on my hijinks.
Fast_Spray_1927@reddit
I refuse to answer. But let's just say I shouldn't be alive now. Lol
Ecjg2010@reddit
Ring and run was a popular one with me as a kid. Then there was the fresh cement that had my initials in it for many, many years. We used to drive to the end of the road to go off roading and shooting at bottles as a teen.
Jed308613@reddit
Pretty much all hijinks I was involved with were crimes. Minor crimes and misdemeanors, but still crimes.
fogonthecoast@reddit
One Halloween in Chicago, my friends and I thought it would be funny to egg some cars. Someone had the bright idea to also bring bags of flour, so we ended up flouring and egging them. It started to rain while we were doing this, so the eggs/flour combo turned into dough. I can't imagine it was fun trying to remove the next day...
Cute_Conclusion_1355@reddit
Toilet papering
LuLuMarie1313@reddit
One of my friends would throw huge parties every time his parents went of town. Everyone was underage and drunk. Cops usually showed up and we would go hide in the woods behind his house. Somehow those of us who made it to the woods never got caught. I’m still not sure how!
nite_skye_@reddit
Cops don’t want to wander in the woods after you. The poison ivy and twisted ankle isn’t worth catching you!
LuLuMarie1313@reddit
Good point! lol
USConservativeVegan@reddit
Sneaking out of the homes in the Middle of the night to meet up with friends. I was around 14 when we started it. It became a weekly thing during the summer. We go hang out at abandoned house or maybe go hang out with some friend who's parents really didn't care he had people over. One friend was able to take a couple beers from his dad's 24 pack without him noticing. We always have a pack of smokes. Later we starting smoking weed.
I guess some of those are actual crimes, but at the time it felt like juvenile hijinks.
BuildingMaleficent11@reddit
I was in NYC and took 2 busses and train to see a movie when I was supposed to be studying.
Why is this shenanigans? It was the 80’s.
Every family wedding had an open bar and the kids (myself included) decided these were occasions for drinking games. We’d liberate bottles of alcohol and hide out in the cloakroom getting shit faced.
We’d get someone with a license to rent a car, get fake ID’s and go to clubs. CBGB always made us, but other clubs waved us in.
Surprisingly, none of us ever did more than drink. No drugs or smoking. Well, a couple of the older guys smoked. None of my direct contemporaries did.
CatPurrsonNo1@reddit
My friends and I used to start small fires in safe areas. We lived in the suburbs, so we were always at risk of getting caught. I remember one time I was trying to stomp out a fire, and I melted the sole of my shoe! Never did any property damage or anything.
squarebody8675@reddit
Rang the church bell on Halloween
ChatnNaked@reddit
Mostly my younger brother’s friends caused a lot of chaos. They would fill up garbage cans with water and lean them against front doors. Get river rocks and drive around tossing the through windows of parked cars. Any house that had “lawn job” it was probably them. They ruined a High Schools newly finished Football doing lawn jobs and donuts on the new grass. Most these kids ended up in jail, the older they got the worse trouble they got into. Lower middle class suburban kids, pretty much all from broken homes. Luckily my brother knew when it was time to leave.
KnoWanUKnow2@reddit
Skinny dipping of course. Nude cliff diving once.
I once picked a random phone number and dialed it several time over a period of 3 hours, always asking for Frank. Finally after 3 hours of this I called and said "My name is Frank. Do you have any messages for me?"
ProfessorSpitz@reddit
This was nothing wild, just nerdy. I got kicked out K-Mart for the most 1980s reason. The Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard was just released, a small synthesizer with a built-in mic. I recorded the f-word in into one of the display models, and then programmed it to sing "Jingle Bells" with just the f-word as the lyric. I thought it was hilarious.
WinterDawnMI@reddit
That is hilarious! 😂😆
scienceprodigy@reddit
Street races on some weekends. Skateboarding the roof of the local elementary school. Egging and toilet papering friend’s houses. Ding dong ditching.
DependentFun2691@reddit
Did some illicit drugs while at work also called in a radio station and won some tickets to an amusement park. I never got caught. That store is no longer around. Some good times. Will never do that again.
RMDVanilaGorila@reddit
Mailbox baseball was the dumbest thing I got caught doing.
moon_goddess235@reddit
My sister and I are Irish twins, so we were extremely close, growing up, and got into all of our teenage hijinks, together.
One weekend, we decided to pick up a couple of guy friends, and take a ride up to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and check out the decommissioned planes they had sitting out on an old tarmac. We were hanging out, and drinking, and just walking down the runway, not really doing anything bad, when suddenly the MP's showed up. They were not too pleased with us trespassing on the base.... apparently that's a fairly big crime. Who knew? 🤷🏼♀️😅 Anyway, they separated us, questioned us, made us all write statements, then judged which one of us was the least inebriated (that was me), and told me to drive everyone back to Cincinnati. I have never been so scared, I thought for sure we were going to wind up in military jail! Then there was the time we took our first LSD trip, together. First, we called the guy who gave it to us0, because we SWORE the tabs were bad, but I guess he could tell by the way we couldn't stop laughing, that all was well. He said if we didn't feel it in the next 30 minutes, to call him back...but, that turned out to be completely unnecessary! We listened to "Delirious" and "Raw", and I have never laughed so hard, in my life! Good times, I tell ya! 😂
reporterbabe@reddit
I started a teen witchcraft coven after reading “The Active Enzyme Lemon Freshened Junior High School Witch.” As an obvious nerd, I checked more witchcraft books out of the library.
Also, my boyfriend a few years later figured out that the camper in his backyard was much more private than parking.
BigBri0011@reddit
Yay statute of limitations.
When I was 15 (maybe 16? 85 or 86) I lived near the beach. So friends and I went to the beach one night during summer and I decided not to go home with them. Turns out the big main lifeguard station was on pylons and underneath was nice and clean and warm. Great place to sleep. Now, the gub-ment had put in an expressway from the beach to a big navy base on town over. To pay for said road, there were toll booths that were set up.
These weren't the king with a person there taking money, it was just a basket you had to toss your dime in (yes, THAT old) and then a little fake traffic light went from red to green and you'd go. They worked properly about half the time. If you didn't pay, a light would flash for about 10 seconds and a bell would ring. Would happen all the time because they weren't shit for working properly.
So on my maybe 4th day living at the beach, I was out of money. The lifeguard spot opened up at 6am, so I would sneak away once they started making noise. I'm sure they knew I was there, but no one ever hassled me. I'd walk my happy ass to 7-11 and ask for a free cup of water. I'd get a little coffee cup of water. Walk down to where the tollbooths were, and jam that cup in the bottom of one of the baskets. I'd always rotate, there were maybe 4 or 5 baskets there.
Then I'd sleep in the bushes for a while, until the morning rush hour traffic died down. I'd have to wait till there were no cars at all, but I'd get my cup back and it would be overflowing with dimes and quarters. I'd keep about $5 or so of it and dump the rest back in the basket. That would be my 7-11 money for the day. A super big gulp and some nachos and maybe a hotdog or burrito. OK, there were a few days I'd take it all and go chill at the arcade for a good long time. lol
My dad was working 24/7 and banging a few secretaries, I'm sure. My mom had an opiate problem, so neither of them ever noticed I wasn't ever home. My older brother asked a few of my friends where I was after about a week. He used to work at the Holiday Inn and he finally caught up with me. Handed me a room key. I guess some family paid for a week and bailed early. No refunds. So I got to sleep in a bed every now and then. Usually during the day because bro and his friends would have parties in the hotel room at night. (That's a whole nother story)
I stayed at the beach for about 10 weeks. Hands down the best summer of my life. It's funny, after that summer I didn't stress too much because I knew I'd be OK if I wound up homeless. By the end of that summer, I had different restaurants I could wash dishes or sweep up the parking lot for a real meal. Met some cool ass people who lived on the street. Met some HUGE assholes, too. Luckily I started Tae Kwon Do at 11 so I could handle myself if anyone wanted to get rough.
My last week, I taught this old dude named Paul my toll booth trick. He seemed old as shit to me, but I bet he was 40 at the oldest. Ran into him a few times over the years before I moved away.
Astronaut6735@reddit
It's amazing how resourceful we could be, and how little we actually needed to survive and be happy.
That was back when most TKD schools were legit, before it was added to the Olympics in '88, and all the McDojo's opened up.
BigBri0011@reddit
Yeah, it was the real deal. Even had to learn to speak Korean enough to get your black belt. Spanish at school was bad enough, so I quit and went to boxing. Got in all sorts of trouble the first few months for kicking. Then went to judo and same thing with punching. I guess I did it totally backwards. lol
AQUEON@reddit
Galloped my horse across the golf course in the evening.
VoxelPointVolume@reddit
When I was like 14 or 15, I crawled up the telephone pole and hooked up cable tv to my house. I was worried they would find out, so I hooked up a bunch or other houses as well thinking that I would have plausible deniability or something. Lasted for a few years until it was disconnected!
FloppyFerrett1@reddit
Smart hooking up the other neighbors! I’d have just gone back & tried to rehook everything back up though lol
Ok-Entertainment5045@reddit
Whatever man, I’m no snitch
fongaboo@reddit
Our first VCR was a top-loading betamax. It didn't have a wireless remote control. Instead, it had a remote with a 50-ft cable and a single toggle button that could pause recording or playback, but nothing else.
It used a 3/16" connector. I soon realize that my star studio boombox also could take that connector to control stop and start of a playback or recording.
My brother and I shared a bedroom so I put a scary Halloween sound effect tape in the star studio. I put the star studio into the closet. Then carefully ran all 50 ft underneath the edges of the carpet in the bedroom until it reached my bed.
When it was bedtime, I would make the monsters come alive inside the closet. Much to my brother's dismay and trauma.
RoamingGnome74@reddit
Snuck out at night to get drunk and smoke pot.
quiltsohard@reddit
I lived near the Mexico border. We would all tell our parents we were staying the night at a friends then pool our money and get a hotel room in El Paso and walk across the border into Juarez. In the 80’s they had 25 cent tequila shots. I think the drinking age was 16 but we never got carded
RoamingGnome74@reddit
Ahhhh I miss those days. We were so fortunate. Well I mean a lot of us went missing and are probably dead now, but those were fun times. 😂
quiltsohard@reddit
My senior year of high school the school got involved because Americans were getting kidnapped. If you were caught in Mexico you’d get kicked out of school. Thinking back now I don’t know how they would catch us except red handed. It’s not like anyone had a phone. No tracking or pics
dmcdd@reddit
Only the weak were left behind.
fongaboo@reddit
I got one of those consumer synthesizer keyboards from Casio that could sample bits of live audio and then let you use that as an instrument you played with the keyboard.
But I had the sk-5 which had separate memory banks for four different samples. It also had a very simplistic sequencer. Where you would hit record and start playing a pattern and then hit stop and then you could have that routine played back and even loop.
So I used to take it to school and leave it in my locker. But I would record a different curse word into each sample Bank and then just have a sequence loaded to trigger each one every so often. By slowing down the tempo. It would leave seconds to minutes in between each one
So basically there were probably hole monitors that thought that work coming down with schizophrenia combined with tourette's.
EntertainmentNew5165@reddit
If I told you , I’d have to **!! you.
Loose lips, sink ships.
WinterDawnMI@reddit
Toilet papered my ex's house a few times, let the air out of another ex's tires while he was in the car making out with his new girlfriend, put a dead skunk on the girlfriend's front porch, prolly more things but that's what stands out.
Think_Cheesecake7464@reddit
I also admit to soooo many prank calls. Never mean. Always silly. Usually to someone who ended up knowing it was us.
Caller ID destroyed a part of me.
Beautiful-Routine295@reddit
Crawling into empty homes via dog doors to smoke weed. To be fair, these were abandoned. So no crime. Never left evidence either. One house stank so bad they had a cat piss carpet that should have been a crime.
MaximumJones@reddit
https://i.redd.it/ijgxvc0rj2qg1.gif
Random0s2oh@reddit
Didn't drink. Didn't smoke. What did I do? I had a kid as a kid.
More_Programmer5053@reddit
My friends built a shack in the woods by a local ski area from found wood, plywood, and sheet metal. It even had a woodstove in it. We called it Ace’s Place, and we partied in it all the time. I was 15. One winter night I was cold, so I slept right next to the woodstove, and burned my butt pretty badly. Good times though.
dmcdd@reddit
There is no evidence connecting me to those hijinks, and that's the way I'm going to keep it. No videos, no witnesses.
I don't discuss details because anyone trying what we got away with would now be made internet famous for a few minutes and then behind bars for quite a few longer minutes.
Flat_6_Theory@reddit
Shaving cream can bombs. Where you stab a can of regular style shaving cream with a Bic pen and throw it in a room or a car. That stuff gets everywhere. Menthol was my calling card.
Appropriated most of the shower handles from the other barracks in a midnight raid at military school.
Olive loafing windshields as we drove by. Slices of olive loaf stuck better than raw biscuits from the can.
Sneaking my parents’ cars when they were out of town. Mine was a PoS. Threw a party once at the house while in HS. Plus the assorted petty actions like underage drinking and dope.
Ckc1972@reddit
Hitchhiking
More_Programmer5053@reddit
Lots of this; to varied effect
specific-eletrick@reddit
Nice try FBI
Blah_the_pink@reddit
Right?
heybucket459@reddit
2 things stand out: 1 bought bowling balls from a garage sale then drove up a steep hill near a rural area and let them roll! Lucky it didn’t hit anything as they barreled down hillside. One completely embedded into field like a meteor! 2- new homes being built in area, one night we got bored and decided to just “slightly” move a few survey stakes from each lot a few inches left/right! I always wandered if anyone has a crooked house or fence line!
Oh to be young and bored before cellphones and internet
asyouwish@reddit
BFF and I lied about movie times and told our parents we were at each other's, one before and a different one after.
We went to a movie, started walking toward home-ish, and ran into some of the cool kids who weren't dicks to us that night even though they were all the other times. Maybe they were afraid we'd tattle. We conned some older guys into giving us beer (it was like 3 beers for a dozen kids) and patrolled the neighborhood as a whole gaggle. A teacher saw us and called the Bully's mom and step dad (who were out of town). So we hid in their house while Bully's older brother, who was "in charge" that weekend, was upstairs trying to get his girlfriend to have sex. I think someone even pretended to be the older brother on the phone with the teacher.
We weren't hurting anything or anyone.
Aside from Bully, the worst guy related to the whole bunch was that same teacher's kid. His girlfriend "magically" had her period all the time because he was pressuring her before she was ready. I think she was an 8th grader. It seemed to me like that teacher needed to raise her own kids better and stop worrying about neighborhood kids who were literally just walking.
Years later, that teacher and I became close in a professional context outside of school. I never told her I was in that gaggle.
My parents also never found out which is how I'm here to tell the dumb story.
saabguy296@reddit
Paintballing cop cars on Halloween in full camo from strategic positions. We’d be shot dead today.
DaisyMaeMiller1984@reddit
One Halloween our group of friends dressed in black with berets and plastic Uzis and went as a group of terrorists
It was the 80s. Nobody died, but we TPed a house pretty good
TRS80487@reddit
Robbed beer trucks before heading to the beach.
VeryLowIQIndividual@reddit
Throwing 🍅 at cars.
ironeagle2006@reddit
Took the valve cores out of a squad car that was parked outside the local McDonald's. The cop was an asshole to everyone in town and no one said a damn thing. Another time got caught by my parents after a party hiding my leftover everclear and other booze underneath the porch. My dad made me pour it down the drain except for the Jack Daniel's him and I drank that the next night.
Got into a massive fight in the school started off 4 on 1 and I was the 1. By the end of it the 4 had a combined 3 broken arms 5 broken hands 6 destroyed knees and a combined loss of 22 teeth. I ended up with a concussion and bruised ribs and suspended for 3 days out of school. The best part was the investigation afterwards when it came out these 4 had been ordered by a teacher to jump me to hurt me for refusing to play basketball on the team.
Worst thing I did separating kids with fox body mustang 5.0s from their cash in large amounts with a Frankensteined 3.0 Buick Century that had a Grand National intake and exhaust system including the turbocharger on it. The only problem I had was keeping tires on it.
hogger303@reddit
Same thing happened to me, except there were 5 of them, they were 22 years old AND they had guns.
I killed 2, hospitalized the other 3, I slowly walked home and nailed their Moms... I was 10 years old at the time.
LurkingViolet781123@reddit
Paid a friend $5 to let me shove him in a shopping cart downhill. Best $5 I ever spent. He stayed in the entire time, didn't get hurt, and thanked me for the money that he immediately spent at Taco Bell.
Teet73@reddit
Not today, FBI, not today!
ChrystineDreams@reddit
I am forever thankful we did our dumb/silly shit before there were cameras everywhere.
Astronaut6735@reddit
Yes, and before social media for the world to see the pictures.
ChrystineDreams@reddit
So that guy who got hit in the arm with the pickle from a $0.99 MickyD's cheeseburger that was hucked into traffic will never know who did it.
It wasn't me it was my friend. the girl with the safety-pin piercing thru her nose.
Rev_Biscuit@reddit
Theft or Shrubbery
Fullonski@reddit
I do beg your pardon
DarePitiful5750@reddit
Since my neighbor buddy had the same TV in their Den. The TV you could see right from the front door side window. I'd go over and change the channel on his TV and confuse the F out of him. Would only do if the parents weren't home.
novelist9@reddit
We made our own lip-sync music videos, but to do so, we obviously needed color floodlights. These we stole from various neighborhood front yards on video night.
Feisty_Beach392@reddit
Ya know the tall rocket ships they used to have at parks, usually a few stories tall and you would climb the interior ladder to the top where there would be a slide you used to get back down? Okay.
So a little group of us delinquents tied a fire hose to a tall tree adjacent to one of those rockets and also removed a couple of the safety bars at the top of the rocket. We would use it as a rope swing, standing outside the rocket on the upper level whilst someone on the ground would toss the rope (fire hose) up to us. It was so fucking fun. Acid was usually involved. Weed was ALWAYS involved.
Eventually, after multiple attempts at cutting the rope (fire hose) down was met with the tenacity that only an adolescent group of ne'er-do-wells could have, the local fire department literally blasted our dreams into space and had the rocket removed … and kids today have no clue why their parents nostalgically refer to their little league practice area as Rocket Park.
Myanonymousunicorn@reddit
Stealing street signs and lawn ornaments to decorate our bedrooms. Pool hopping (jumping fence on the pool after midnight - public but sometimes also backyard). Roof hopping - climbing up buildings and trying to go from roof to roof (they were very close together). Going into grocery stores and sucking the whipped cream can nitrous. Hmm…. Everything else was more of a real crime….
NeatConversation530@reddit
Switched the handles on the bathroom door. You pull it open from the inside so when I switched it I put the smooth “push” plate on the inside. I ended up taking the principal in there. He sent a kid out through the window to go around and let him out. I made the school news.
LetSubstantial1763@reddit
Very clever!! 😝
Potential_Miserable@reddit
Chronic run away landed in me in juvi for 3 years
MarcoEsteban@reddit
At 15-16, I was a ho in training. The gay kind. I was sneaking out of my parents' house to go down to the city and go to bars where I knew they met under aged kids in (mostly hustler bars). I put an ad in the local personals pages (the Grindr of the pre-internet days). And I was just basically having sex and partying (drugs like ecstasy, crystal meth, acid, coke, etc.). I got invited to a lot of parties and by the time I was in college, I was more of a club kid, but still a ho...just a bit more selective. Really,I was just looking for love in majorly wrong places.
I swear i didn't think I'd live to 35, let alone 58. I have calmed down a lot now.
Astronaut6735@reddit
There was a public park at a small lake where people would go skinny dipping on dark nights. One night we grabbed some empty 2L bottles and some dry ice, put a little crushed dry ice and water in the bottles, put the caps on, and chucked them out by the skinny dippers. Dry ice is just frozen CO2, and as it melts it turns into gas. With nowhere for the gas to go, eventually the plastic bottle splits with an extremely loud BOOM!
Woodythdog@reddit
In 1977 I was arrested by CN tower security for launching a bottle rocket from the outdoor observation deck does that count
Alman54@reddit
In 1977? Seems like security would have high-fived you.
Woodythdog@reddit
LOL the head of security made us wait in his office while he read out loud from the bible until the police came the police called my buddy’s parents to come and get us.
I think I got grounded for a week it wasn’t until years later I found out how hilarious my dad thought the whole thing was.
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
Since this thread immediately turned into crimes: Sure, that counts.
ruarchproton@reddit
Drinking in the graveyard at night!
BigBri0011@reddit
One summer we had an epic bottle rocket war in a graveyard.
ToyWitch13@reddit
Same!
exitparadise@reddit
Sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night. Prank calls.
BotiaDario@reddit
Absolutely none, my father was way too controlling for me to get away with that shit
cinder74@reddit
What happened in the woods, stays in the woods. My lips are sealed.
big_a_baby@reddit
When I left the movie theater I didn't even used to pick up my popcorn what felled
Bastyra2016@reddit
We used to change the letters on the signs that were in front of businesses. My favorite was:
Original-Happiness is not the goal it’s a byproduct. Our version- Piss is not the goal it’s a byproduct.
73rd-virgin@reddit
Lets see...
Stealing chromies off the air stems of car tires.
Sneaking into the housing area on the local Air Force Base.
My friends would steal bikes from the impound yard at the sheriff's department. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbwire. They went in through a hole in the fence where it was along the tree line.
One time we had got some pizza from Little Caesar's and went in the back entrance to the dining area at McDonald's to eat the pizza. Left our trash there.
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
We thought we we going to make SO MUCH MONEY from reselling stolen chromies. We had at least 20, one friend said he could resell them at $5 each.
73rd-virgin@reddit
I don't think we had any such delusions of grandeur, they were just shiny.
pantheroux@reddit
My friend was the first to get her driver’s license and had access to her dad’s van. Her parents were cool. They smoked weed and whenever I went over, they were so friendly and welcoming and had good music playing. When we skipped school we’d hang out at her place and they didn’t mind as we were good kids and honors students.
One day shortly after she got her license, 4 of us were going out for dinner. We felt so grown up, driving there instead of bussing it. It was pouring rain and my friend missed the turnoff to get to the restaurant. We were in a kind of commercial/industrial area that was under development, and there was an open field separating us from where we needed to go. Rather than figuring out how to turn around, my friend was confident she could just drive across the field. She could not. We got stuck in the mud, and after trying to push the van and dig it out with our hands, we called her dad. He came and helped us and took us all home, not saying much. I thought ‘Wow, what a cool dad. He’s not even mad!”
The next morning, my friend phoned at the crack of dawn, requesting I go over. I arrived to find the other kids there as well. We were tasked to wash the van by hand. Whenever we thought we were done, my friend’s dad would inspect it and find more mud. Cool dad or not, it was months before she drove again.
Helpful_Link1383@reddit
I tried to drive on a very secluded Indiana beach ...I did not drive a jeep....we had to walk several miles to get to a phone...
bbonerz@reddit
"Indiana beach" by itself is pretty funny. But Indiana does, indeed, have beach!
Helpful_Link1383@reddit
Well it's some sand that shows when the river down...😁
pantheroux@reddit
Haha, I’m an xennial so a few of my high school friends had cell phones, but none of us who were there that day did. My friend had to walk, soaked and muddy, to a convenience store to use the pay phone.
elpollodiablox@reddit
I mean, this was an actual crime that we didn't really get in trouble for, but we had a penchant for mailbox bashing.
Our last hurrah was when someone grabbed our plate number and called it in. A couple of days later the local police invited us down to the station for a chat. In walks an extremely humorlous FBI agent to explain to us in excruciating detail just how serious it is to disrupt mail delivery.
After that we stuck to just bashing garbage cans.
BanginTheBeat@reddit
Stealing hood ornaments.
Trick-Mechanic8986@reddit
Bombs. We made bombs out of everything. Gunpowder, acid, napalm. A considerably bigger deal post 911 than in 1982 lol.
PRC_Spy@reddit
ANFO bombs are really easy to make if you access to farms with untidy farmers who leave stuff lying around, and automotive workshop waste.
midnight_to_midnight@reddit
Nice try, mom!
reignoferror00@reddit
As a minor "hijink" I used to regularly climb certain schools to get tennis balls off the roof.
Nothing with a bowling ball except driving a friend home from the lounge at a bowling alley and he came out with a ten pin bowling ball. Woke up beside it the next day not remembering he had done that and had no clue how the ball got into bed beside him.
ChiliDog762@reddit
I stayed an hour past curfew.
Lost-Ad2458@reddit
They were working on a pipeline on a hill near us, had bulldozers and a backhoe up tehre that they left the keys in, which we kept a couple in case they got wise. We would race the bulldozers and knock pipes into the holes they were digging and dig with the backhoe. It was a lot of fun at 12 years old. Surprisingly, no one ever came and tried to see what was going on.
alwayssearching117@reddit
My friend and I were caught writing our names in wet cement on a sidewalk. A security guard called our parents to tell them. Our names may still be there.
kategoad@reddit
Regularly snuck out. Regularly drank. Skipped class a LOT. Convinced my parents that bars were 18 if a band was playing. Dated an adult (to be fair, I waited until debate season was over because he was the assistant coach of another team, and he was also only 21 to my 18, so it was not as creepy as it could have been), but he did have an apartment.
No one really gave a damn because I was a straight A student. Most people were shocked into silence when they found out what I got up to.
debbie_does_downer@reddit
Hmm, yeah, no. Turns out they were all actually crimes 😉
emax4@reddit
My friends Dad was a priest. One day at the church we go into the social hall and see tables set up for some reception. I forget whose idea it was but we stuck holes in the bottoms of some of the Styrofoam coffee cups.
I wasn't there because I was a different religion, but he said what went on was hysterical.
B1btek@reddit
We stole light bulbs from restaurants and businesses especially colored ones and big giant ones like the old Taco Bell ones just to have them for decoration and for the fun of getting them while the place was open.
acecoffeeco@reddit
dumpster fires
Alman54@reddit
A friend of mine in another state did this. I would talk to him on the phone and he would say "I burned another dumpster today."
acecoffeeco@reddit
so much fun in back of supermarkets. best was when they'd replace fluorescent bulbs, bulb sword fights are a bad idea but such a good time.
hamish1963@reddit
It's probably easier to talk about what I didn't get into.
Stevnated@reddit
My mom volunteered for D.A.R.E. and was responsible for setting out and collecting the donation jars all over our small town. I stole money from them to buy weed. :( I know, I know, terrible!
Specialist_Yak1019@reddit
I loved making fake ids. There were many options, including, but not limited to walking into the dmv with someone else’s birth certificate before the age of computers and leave with an unchallengeable ID from the state…….. at 17
Unlikely-Ad2660@reddit
Drove really slow in the two lane sections of the backroads and then would floor it in the passing zones so no one could get past us.
Dick move, but funny as hell.
thecookerer@reddit
Late 70's, 3 or 4 of us kids terrorized the neighborhood. We would get into large trash bags, poke arm, leg and eye holes and run around egging and TPing houses. We'd ring the bell and sit on the curb. No one looked at the extra trash bags.
We were so bad, the cops did patrols in our neighborhood. One night, we timed the patrol officer as he drove our street. He came over a blind hill every 10 minutes or so. We ran TP across the street just over the hill from a light pole on one side and telephone pole on the other, making a wall about 5 feet high. Then sat on the curb in our trash bags. Cop came over the hill and did a starsky and hutch move right through the toilet paper wall. He flipped the lights on and sat there for a long time. I imagine he was checking his pants. I know we scared him. He never saw the giggling trash bags and we never saw another patrol in our neighborhood. Never get away with that now.
nite_skye_@reddit
Trash bags!!!! Brilliant! I wish I had used this disguise.
Zestyclose-Smell-788@reddit
I would sneak out of the house and take Idlewild Garden Club "Yard of the Month" club sign, and relocate it to the crappiest yard in the neighborhood. They even chained it down eventually. I cut the chain and moved it to a dead end where people were dumping trash.
I was 14, maybe 15
frozenswampmonster@reddit
Before caller I’d was a thing, we thought crank calling was a a good time.
We had a town square. Not illegal to be there after dark, but cops would show up and kick you out if you made noise. So we (teenagers) would go and silently play quiet games (e.g. croquet, frisbee) while cops circled but didn’t have excuse to harass us (we didn’t drink or smoke or anything). We thought we were so cool.
Automatic-Nature6025@reddit
My favorite was the potato cannon, before they became seriously illegal. We'd also wander the neighborhood in the middle of the night, we'd grab the "welcome" mats off a bunch of porches, and pick one house, and lay out all the mats on their porch and walkway. They'd all eventually get their mats back eventually.
Grease2feminist@reddit
Too much Mad Dogg 2020 when South Beach was a trashy punk rock place and I puked purple on multiple people. Multiple times. And exploring the rooftops w/ no OSHA after getting drunk up there
CharmingDagger@reddit
A local drug store carried mad dog. Three of us would go in -- two to act suspicious and distract security and the other to slip a bottle inside his jacket. We'd meet out behind the drug store to drink it. I think we were 13 or 14. Never got caught.
Grease2feminist@reddit
I know you!
CharmingDagger@reddit
LOL there are probably hundreds of us. Unless you are from southwest Washington ... then it's a really small world.
ConsistentCrazy5745@reddit
Used to take speed and ecstasy, go joy riding with lads quite a bit older than me and generally acted like a pain in arse. I've got a 14 year old daughter now and there's no way in a million years I'd let her get away with half the stuff I did. I'm actually really glad she's so sensible and not an idiot like I was
headhurt21@reddit
Prank calls (before Caller ID, obviously).
I remember being invited to a party (I was about 16). Some dude knew a dude who got a keg. We go to the house, the lights are kept dim. Everyone is warned to not be loud so as not to attract attention of the neighbors. So, we're all sitting around with our red solo cups filled with shitty beer, being absolutely silent. It was so odd.
nite_skye_@reddit
We went to a few parties like that except it wasn’t silent and it always turned out badly! One night we were out riding around looking for something to do. We were in an area about 20 minutes by car from our neighborhoods. We saw this guy we knew walking down the street. Asked if he needed a ride. He said he was going to this party up the road. My boyfriend and I tagged along. We had to park several blocks away. That’s how many cars were there! The place was packed. A band was playing in the basement where the keg was so we headed down there. Hung out downstairs the entire time. Went to find a bathroom and we couldn’t get up the stairs. The carpet had been ripped up and was like a slide. Upstairs the house was destroyed. There was not a place that a person was standing, sitting, passed out. We decided it might be a good time to leave. We always had a big bag of weed in us and didn’t want to get busted. Right before we reached our car several cop cars came flying up the street to break up the party. We ducked down and they kept going. We drove out of there as fast as we could. The next week the story was the parents took the boys (twins) out of school and put them in a military school! Jewelry and electronics were stolen and the entire place inside and out was destroyed. I never understood why people do that but I learned by other’s mistakes and never had a party at my house! We’d just go to a lake near our home or the woods. Had to run from the cops a few times. They used helicopters a lot of times 🤣 but we were teens and could disperse in all directions quickly!
Wabi-Sabi_Umami@reddit
gmoreschi@reddit
We would call a taxi to the house across the street. When it showed up, we would pop up from behind the bushes and pelt it with snowballs, or whatever we could find. Back when cable TV had universal remotes, we would take one of our own, go around the neighborhood and through peoples windows, change the channel, or turn off their TV. It was glorious.
GreasyChalms@reddit
Mountain bowling
beef-hed@reddit
Having pizza to delivered to someone as a prank. Prank calling in general. Another fun thing destroyed by technology.
sobuffalo@reddit
phone pranks in general, at least until *69.
"is your refrigerator running" and "Do you have Prince Albert in a Can? You better let him out"
I read about 1 prank and tried it but it failed. "You call and tell them your a linemen and working on the phone line and if it rings don't answer it". Then when you call back and they answer you make it sound like you got electrocuted ZZZWWWAppppTT. They either didn't pick up or something like "If you call back I'll kick your ass"
pikohina@reddit
Get me Brent Weir, I said!
Legal-Western5580@reddit
There was a pizza place in our yellow pages back then called Chez Pizza, but it had gone out of business and some poor soul had been assigned their phone number while the ad was still active, so we would call this poor dude up at 1:00 in the morning and try to convince him that he should just get up and make a pizza for us because otherwise it would be false advertising.
It took about 2 months for him to change his number. I think about him often.
aogamerdude@reddit
I'd say that first one still happens, about 10 years ago someone did that 3 times to my apartment that I figured maybe it wasn't a prank yet what else could it be, then Pizza Hut by then would not deliver to that apartment lol.
TrailerTrashQueen@reddit
in my early teens, this older girl convinced me and a few friends to vandalize a neighbor's house. the girl was a bully. we were afraid to say no.
we later heard that the neighbor cried when she saw the condition of her house. i carried the guilt of it for years. still do. to this day, it's one of the worst things i've ever done.
ComfortableRow8437@reddit
Fireworks wars. Many, several times. Even caught the neighbors' bushes on fire. I can believe we didn't lose eyes or fingers.
CharmingDagger@reddit
Yellow wiffle ball bats with the hole on the bottom were perfect for launching bottle rockets at each other. We pretended like they were bazookas. The fun stopped when one of our friends fucked up his hand trying to throw a firecracker.
Grease2feminist@reddit
My brother & I set them off inside. On the carpet. In mom’s bedroom. To see what would happen. Some good. Some bad. Some scorch marks
RoninRobot@reddit
We always did this on the 4th. Bottle rocket tubes and crackle grenades. My young nephew brought his friend who had such a great time he came back for years afterwards. Saw him 15 years afterwards and the first thing he told me is he still has the shirt from those wars and the multiple burn holes are badges of honor.
Krissy_ok@reddit
Trespassing, mainly. No real crimes or serious damage but "Keep Out" meant nothing to us.
ruarchproton@reddit
Absolutely this. We used to sneak into buildings and houses under construction. Never stole anything just explored.
Historical-Ad-1067@reddit
Car surfing
abudaddy@reddit
Drank beer with friends in a freshly dug (but not occupied!) grave after winning “best guitarist” in a local battle of the bands. Picked up by the cops after walking back to the car (to get more beer) - forced to ride in the back seat while they drove around trying to catch my friends (who escaped by running through the nearby woods). After being released from custody, rode along the highway to the state line where I picked them up and raced home. Only to find my dad had been listening to the scanner and knew all about it before I walked in the door.
yournewfave@reddit
We would steal quarters from my friend’s mom’s tip jar. Then we would go to the store and buy candy and cigarettes. All this at age 9.
True_Huckleberry9569@reddit
We were always up in a tree. Sometimes just to see how climbable it was. Not sure why, we just did. Once we were up there, ideas started flowing…
Lived in a cul-de-sac. Took some popcorn kernels up in a tree once. Waited for the ice cream man to come. My sister and I threw a handful each, at the same time. He didn’t know what was happening. Took all I had in me not to cackle from his reaction and give ourselves away.
Later in life, we would just chill in a tree and smoke. Which turned out to become an inside joke because the Reserve recruiter told us “If you wanna get high, climb a tree. If you wanna get fucked up, jump out”. He didn’t understand why we found that so funny.
Phoenix_Clan@reddit
I made a prank phone call to someone who lived on the Elm Street in my city.
Odd_Examination2732@reddit
Hood Ornaments.
geoffrey2970@reddit
Took fire extinguisher filled w water to lake, rented canoe and sprayed girls with it. Hung up wooden snowmen from school flag pole - someone stole it, TeePee’d an enemy’s house w a group. A friend who had to go shit on their porch during the “throw” - oh the irony that he didn’t wipe - unfortunately guy who was driving us all lost his 80s first-generation garage remote for the Delta 88 in the yard (it was huge like eraser-sized so who knows how). It had his parents’ full name and address on back of it. Guess who cleaned up everything, alone.
Temporary_Shirt_6236@reddit
I am reasonably sure that all of our shenanigans were illegal back then. Some still are, but they used to be too.
bagoTrekker@reddit
NotARobotDefACyborg@reddit
Underrated comment! 😂😂😂
Jetro-2023@reddit
I took milk crates from businesses
DesignNormal9257@reddit
Rolling drunks. Sleazy, older men who hit on underage girls in clubs. Nothing too bad, but would take their coats in the middle of winter.
Full-Honeydew-4898@reddit
Calling people on the good old rotary phone and asking if their refrigerator is running. If they say yes, tell them they better go catch it and laugh hysterically while hanging up. Good Times!
MrMackSir@reddit
As a early teen:
bottle rocket wars where we would shoot them at each other.
We would put bologna slides on windshields at night in the winter; when they froze it was a real challenge to remove them.
We would take a little alcohol from each of our parents liquor cabinets. Mix it together and drink. A little older we would "get" alcohol to drink - we skiied a lot in the winter - we would fill our ski poles with booze to drink on the lifts at a spot in the trees. We would also take the serving trays to sled down the hills.
BoredBSEE@reddit
The ski pole idea is brilliant. That never occurred to me at all.
MrMackSir@reddit
Test you pole with water first. Not all hold liquid.
TickingTheMoments@reddit
My brother and I, when remote controls started becoming a thing, walked around behind people’s townhouses and changed their channels with our remote control.
We thought it was the most hilarious thing
frozenswampmonster@reddit
We used to do the same thing. Thought it was so hilarious. Peak childhood shenanigans.
rideboards13@reddit
I stole a universal remote control to my teachers classroom. I walked around turning on their televisions for a few weeks. cranked up the volume . it was great. eventually got caught. crime wise, stealing pumpkins was my jam.
bored2death2@reddit
Locked some guy into a port-a-potty at a football game. He started to get loud about being stuck as a couple of police officers drifted by and hear him. The mark avoided being tipped over my mere moments. As it was the cops laughed it off and told us to go do something else.
Oy_wth_the_poodles@reddit
Our neighborhood had a 4/5 story cliff that had a police station below, we used to throw glass bottles (stupidly) on the parking lot. The last time we did it we were walking home and the police stopped to ask us if we saw anybody throwing bottles. We said we didn’t see anything and that was it we walked home. Ah to be dumb and young.
madgeface@reddit
In middle school my friends and I had a sugar-fueled slumber party (actually one of many) and all peed on the double yellow line of a very busy road in the middle of the night. Bonding, 80s-style.
madgeface@reddit
Twin fraternal boys were in my class, which was under 125 so pretty small. Their parents got divorced. Our senior year, they lived with their alcoholic dad who was on an endless business trip AFAWK. That was the place to be senior year, both during the school week and on weekends. "[Dad's name]'s Poker Palace" is what we called it.
madgeface@reddit
High school: We used to roof ride on dirt roads in my New England home state. One night, this giy missed the roof and went through the rear window of a 1980s-era Suburban. Same kid said "No problem! We'll find another one of this model year and steal that window and install it in ___'s suburban. It worked even though the tint wasn't an exact match. He parents never knew what happened.
HolidayEggplant81@reddit
Our HS English teacher made a big deal out of the fact none of us took our studies of Julius Caesar seriously.
We took up a collection and took out an ad in the paper listing a sports car at a comically low but feasible price. The listing began on March 15.
She was not amused, but at least conceded that we'd paid a little bit of attention. 😁
CharmingDagger@reddit
That's hilarious
iFuckingLoveBoston@reddit
We used to steal those big ole xmas light bulbs outside and smash them in the street. Nice little boom boom. Obvs its a crime, but not for white kids..
shackletons_gps@reddit
Use the copy machine at the library on dollar bills after we found that the change machine at the bowling alley arcade would accept them and spit out quarters. Played for free all summer between 7th and 8th grades. No idea how we got away with it for almost three months.
DaisyMaeMiller1984@reddit
Straight up gangster
CaterpillarHot4132@reddit
A group of five of six of us played car tag one night in 1989 when we were 16-17 ... throwing Ziploc bags of flour at one another's cars. I always wondered what folks thought about the random baggies of white powder strewn across the west end of town.
RoninRobot@reddit
Same. Car tag but ours was bumping the rear bumper. Borders were a square mile neighborhood with twisty roads, no main streets. Whiney kid learned about it, insisted he be included. We said no, he showed up anyway and then actually cried when his bumper got dented. Fuckin Kyle. Midnight to three am and nobody ever called the cops.
Mangolandia@reddit
Used tape to stick point side up thumb tacks on teacher seats; hid textbooks in the bathroom during tests to sneak a peek at formulas I couldn’t remember; ran to the copy room for discarded mimeographed exam copies before exams; prank calls galore; ripped all labels off cans in a friend’s house (her idea to avoid canned beef stew); dropped fake love notes into random lockers; and in my first jobs would hide phone receivers and staged a silly string war (lots of cleanup, don’t recommend)
BobMortimersButthole@reddit
My friend's and I were broke but wanted to do something fun for my 18th birthday, so someone took birthday candles from their mom's kitchen and they pooled their money to buy me a deep-fried burrito at Taco Time, or someplace with a similar name, as a "Birthday Burrito".
We went to a covered picnic bench in the park and my friends stuck 18 candles into the burrito and lit it while singing happy birthday. The burrito promptly caught fire and had 6 ft flames flicking the old wooden cover, and it started spring hot grease and beans at us, so nobody could grab it.
Of course a cop drove by right then, and stopped to accuse us of trying to vandalize the park in broad daylight after he put out the flaming rectangular black lump on the wooden picnic table. It took a lot of explaining to get him to believe we weren't actually attempting to set fire to the playground. He let us off with a warning and we offered him a piece of my birthday burrito for his troubles. He declined.
CharmingDagger@reddit
Changing the letters on business signs to spell other things. Which actually was probably illegal in some way (vandalism?).
Also egged the principal's house. Someone in our group confessed and the rest of us had to sweat through a weekend while the principal thought about calling the cops.
I'm sure there are many more things I just don't remember anymore. I was a brat.
Kodiak01@reddit
Buying booze as a teen was easy, just walked into the local Hadjimart, grabbed a 40, tossed a couple bucks on the counter and walk out. Would wave to a passing cop with the bottle and they would wave back.
In the winter, teens would have booze-filled bonfires out on the frozen pond. Cops would get off 2nd shift they come out and join us for a beer. Nobody every got hurt or was arrested.
-
Now for the fun stuff.
In my early 20s back in the late 90s, leaving the bar one night and giving a friend a ride home from the bar, I, being 3 sheets to the wind, accidentally rear-ended a carload of gangbangers in a clapped-out Civic in an urban area. We're talking 2mph love tap, no damage. They get out and start demanding money. Cops show up, tell us to pull up to the parking lot after the next light. Gangbangers go into the lot, I hang a hard left and floor it for about 1.5 seconds before coming to my senses and pulling over on the left side of a 1 way street.
This last detail is the only thing that saved my ass.
The cops came up to the car but couldn't open the door because it was just inches from a high concrete section as I was parked in an underpass by a train bridge. Only way out would have been to move the car. They asked me why I started to run, and I (an early 20s White Boy in a seedy part of the city) told them that I was scared shitless because they had threatened me. They had me hand my license and registration through the window, then told us to wait.
They were gone a good 10 minutes. I was sure I was fucked, not because I ran, but if they were to get me out of the car they were likely to also find the half full bottle of Rolling Rock stuffed underneath my seat, sitting next to my (otherwise fully legal) Keltec P-11 9mm stuffed under the seat. Oh, and I later found out my friend had an 8-ball in his pocket.
Let's recap:
At-fault accident
Leaving the scene of an accident
DUI
Open container
Possession of a firearm while intoxicated
Possession of a narcotic with intent to distribute
-
So what did I end up being charged with?
Nothing.
I was really scared when I saw multiple other cruisers show up to the scene. Flashing lights behind me everywhere. I truly thought I was FUCKED. Instead, the officer eventually returned to my car, handed me my documents, and told me to get home safely.
I later found out that the gangbangers had multiple open warrants and likely other undesirables on their persons. They were a MUCH bigger catch than some early-20s scared-shitless white kid from the suburbs.
cianne_marie@reddit
I feel like you win.
splorp_evilbastard@reddit
I would really home for lunch and when I was a junior, I got a rider back from a senior. He had a liter bottle of Sun Country wine cooler that had partially frozen. The alcohol didn't freeze, just mostly the other ingredients. Together, we drank about a quarter of the bottle. I went back to school drunk.
I was a good student and lettered in cross country and track. No teacher seemed to catch on that I was shit-faced.
iAutonomous2072@reddit
Nice try warden
Luxy2801@reddit
Back when cable was first installed in the neighborhood, everyone's box was on the same frequency. My brother tested this late at night. He'd go around the neighborhood and turn on someone's television and turn up the volume just to watch them shuffle out of bed and down the hall to turn off the TV. Then he'd wait for them to go back to bed and he'd turn it on again!
thedog420@reddit
Probably breaking the law but senior year in high school we drove around and threw lit fireworks into peoples back yard fences as we drove by. 17 year old me thought it was a blast but if that happened to me now I'd sure be pissed!
Clean-Entry-262@reddit
We did this too …until my idiot friend lit a pack of Black Cats and accidentally dropped them between the console and the front seat before he could throw them, HaHa!
Alman54@reddit
The noise inside the car had to have been deafening.
Clean-Entry-262@reddit
It was “OH SHIT!!! …GET OUT OF THE CAR!!!” …and then BANG! BANG!BANG! …for about 2 minutes …there were chunks of firecrackers all over the inside of the car (& it had that “fireworks” smell for days afterward)
bbonerz@reddit
Stole a traffic barricade with flasher.
Drive around with rifle toting younger step bro and his friend to intimidate some hoodlums chasing us after a late night movie theater incident
Threw a massive party while parents were gone... but the booze arrived too little and much too late
Fingered a girl on a long bus ride for a marching band event ( I'm deeply troubled by the implications of this, but at the time we both seemed happy about it)
Beat up some younger, very mouthy kids outside our arcade (2v3? 2v4? their advantage)
Lied on the attendance record before senior English class to obfuscate the whereabouts of my stoner, ADHD friend, who was facing detention for being unable to get his shit together.
Passive accomplice to a hoodrat shitting in a coffee can back stage for a week during teachers assistant period, which was then used to dip a rival's trumpet mouthpiece into.
Stole and sold a forgotten/ left behind textbook in college in order to pay for INXS tickets. Got caught, did 20 hours of community service for that. "Criminal conversion."
Shot a dog in the pecker with my BB gun
Blew up and / or torched my lil bro's sandbox toys with fireworks
Inveterate speed limit violator
Alman54@reddit
Funny thing about those traffic flashers, they're really bright inside your car.
Around 1987, a couple of friends and I used to drive out to nearby towns and create mischief. One night we stole a flashing traffic barricade flasher light. Once it was in the car, we discovered it was flashing REALLY BRIGHT and there was no way to turn it off or even open it. We had to wrap a jacket around it to cut the light down.
I ended up throwing it away the next day as it continued flashing and never stopping.
bbonerz@reddit
There is, actually, a switch on it. It's a small push button that you can access through a hole with a small rod. I studied mine and found it.
Amazing how the novelty wears off after a few hours upon taking possession.
Alman54@reddit
Wish I knew that in 1987.
phillygirl2017@reddit
Switched neighbors porch furniture😊
peridot7@reddit
Hmmmm I think all of mine were actual crimes
thejadsel@reddit
Mostly drinking plus whatever drugs we could get hold of, and a little minor vandalism but nothing particularly mean-spirited. Friends and I might be anywhere doing anything, compared to where we told the adults we would be before cellphones.
We'd do shit like just sneak out at night to drink in a cemetery or the freaking woods. I supplied a decent bit of it out of my parents' liquor cabinet, because they didn't drink that often or keep much track of what was even in there between the annual Christmas Bushmills spree or occasional margarita.
Some pretty basic stuff, overall. Because I was sort of a nerd living in a pretty small town--where I knew word would get back to some family member or another if there were witnesses to anything too wild! And potential witnesses could be pretty much anywhere, unsuspected.
maelstrom75@reddit
Taking it all to my grave, legal and illegal alike. Sorry...
hip-disguise@reddit
hajoet@reddit
Made rubber band guns and shot at wasps. Some of us got stung. Oh the memories!
HalfaEnchilada@reddit
I had a Halloween party sleepover in the 6th grade. My friend brought her older cousin who smoked cigarettes. We were 11 and she was 14 and a little bit of a wild one.
She pressured us to go "egging". She took a carton of eggs from my fridge and we followed her outside. She and my other friends started chucking the eggs at parked cars and it was making a real mess. I threw one and immediately went to try and remove it but of course it was stuck. And it was a freezing cold Oct 31 so it was REALLY good and stuck.
Then her final act of suburban terrorism was to drop her lit cigarette into the small opening of a window on my neighbor's car.
The car started to fill with smoke and we took off running back into my basement.
I never saw that car parked on the road again but I don't know if it was totally on fire. I assume it did burn. It was on the next street over so I just always avoided going down that way.
My parents were upset because they had been certain there were eggs for breakfast and I couldn't confess because money was tight enough, and wasting food for my family of 6 wasn't allowed and I didn't want to get in trouble for the egging of cars.
To this day, I feel sick with regret and shame. I would be devastated if I had my paint job ruined by little assholes like us.
Key-Regret-7812@reddit
We got bored one night and drove around taking real estate signs and putting them in teacher's lawns. Nothing too crazy.
SnarkyVamp@reddit
I, too, was part of a sign relocation team!
Temporary_Second3290@reddit
I've been sworn to secrecy.
palmveach1972@reddit
We did this thing called “meals on wheels” we would all clean out our parents refrigerators and pack up bags of rotten food.
Then we would take the food and drive around the neighborhood and throw it on the peoples lawns we didn’t like lol good shit.
AtomicHurricaneBob@reddit
If charges didn't stick is it a crime?
I've been picked up a time or two for simply having too much fun.
BBforever@reddit
Penny on railroad track gets squished real good.
[Spoiler] It does not derail the train.
Just_browsing_2@reddit
"In third grade, I cheated on my history exam. In fourth grade, I stole my uncle Max's toupee and I glued it on my face when I was Moses in my Hebrew School play. In fifth grade, I knocked my sister Edie down the stairs and I blamed it on the dog..."
~Chunk from The Goonies
dafuqizzis@reddit
I really didn’t do all that much “bad stuff” back in my high school days. I was a relatively good kid, hovering on the edge of the ‘nerd’ crowd.
In a fit of wanting to belong, I participated in one night of shenanigans. During Senior Week leading up to Homecoming, several dozen people coordinated efforts to bury “senior lawn” (and the big oak tree in the middle) with as many traffic cones and blinkies as we could find, a couple of Porta-potties, several dozen industrial sized packages of toilet paper from Costco, and one full-sized cow plaster statue some industrious individuals acquired from a local butcher/meat shop. We were most of the way done when the cops showed up, and most people just took off running. My claim to fame was leading a small band of adventurers (my friends) to circle around into the parking lot where we managed to TP a couple of cop cars before taking off. The pictures we took made the end-of-year montage.
That was about it for me.
Now the college years…man, I really made up for lost time. But that’s for a different post.
rackandroll_@reddit
Made Molotov cocktails with beer bottles and gasoline 😳
Krissy_ok@reddit
And flamethrowers! Out of pvc pipes and aerosols.
TenuousOgre@reddit
Riding strictly off road motorbike from our house in the burbs to the mountain motorcross park and trail system, about 3 miles.
Using a cannon I made in metal shop to destroy battleship models I made. Legal if done on property larger than an acre.
Driving motorbike under the chain across the road for the local dirt and sand mine in order to drive on their dirt piles.
Making our own explosives. Making wasn't illegal given all the materials were perfectly legal. Lighting them off on the other hand. Let’s just say I had to rebuild a custom wooden mailbox at some point.
PlutoKaliGal@reddit
Call someone's house from a payphone. Wait for answer and then let the phone dangle off the hook until someone came along to hang it up. Lol. That issue has since been fixed but it was fun fun fun in the 80s😉
0_IceQueen_0@reddit
Graffiti-ed the school wall with friends in '85. It was a private school. They were seniors and I was the only junior. My participation was only holding the spray cans for them lol. We all got caught. Got suspended for 3 days. Parents never knew as I had my aunt pretend to be my mother go to school. To this day she's never told my parents lol.
MidwestAbe@reddit
Stole our high school janitors car. (We did bring it back) broke into college kids houses on winter break (lived in a college town full of rentals) we took beer and weed and maybe a CD or two.
Too much mischief crime to count. Underage drinking and driving every weekend. Buddy broke into our JR High to try and make things out of the anarchist cookbook.
Almost burned down a barn drinking and partying in the country.
treeline47@reddit
Stole a Fallout Shelter sign, proudly displayed it in my room for the duration of high school.
treeline47@reddit
Well… come to think of it, doesn’t fit the question as it was, as my parents pointed out, a federal crime
ApatheistHeretic@reddit
We escalated our acorn fights to the point that we were using PVC pipes, loading them with the powder from M-80s so that we had makeshift cannons to shoot each other.
I soaked one set in lighter fluid overnight to shoot flaming acorns the next day. We stopped that shit after we started a fire in the woods near the apartments.
Reprobate_Dormouse@reddit
Ha, I remember having acorn fights. I don't know if anyone went as far as shooting them from cannons. The fights usually ended when one of the younger kids went home crying.
Organic-Leadership76@reddit
Lived near a large hilly neighborhood with city buslines all around. We would find old tires in the woods and roll them down the hills to try and hit the busses During winter we would mercilessly bomb traffic with snowballs
Madame_Kitsune98@reddit
If you were actually there, you would know.
What I’ll admit to is that we used to climb down underneath a train line overpass, and hang out on the concrete wall that was maybe 18-24 inches wide.
If you were there, you’d know what we were doing.
Rygaaar@reddit
So much stupid shit. Grew up in the burbs of Philly with shitty parents, lots of neighborhoods and backyard cut through to shopping centers. Stole candy, cigarettes, and nudie mags from local convenience stores. Hung out on train tracks and threw rocks at cars and buildings. And at passing trains, which caused a ricochet that almost took my friend’s head off. We’d sneak out and roam the neighborhoods, opened unlocked cars and rifled through their shit, stole toll change and cassettes. Went through a phase where we stole hood ornaments from cars. We used a slingshot to break the back windshield of a car in a church parking lot one night, managed to get it started, and joy rode it all over the church grounds, absolutely destroying the lawns. We sprayed graffiti on all the walls at the local shopping center. We ditched school to steal beer and take acid at my friend’s dad’s house who had m80’s in his basement, so we blew up his hibachi. We were absolute fucking nightmares.
Thing is, I’m a dad now and have left my life of crime faaaar behind me. But my kid? He ain’t getting away with SHIT.
macthulhu@reddit
Most of my teen hobbies would get me sent to Gitmo now...
I grew up next to a gated summer resort community that had a very small unarmed police force, so we got pretty bold. We would spend hours late at night stealing all of the lawn and patio furniture from one house, and swapping it with a house down the street, all set up as close to the original layout as possible. We also swapped boats tied up on their docks a couple of times, but that was a much more delicate process. We got away with that for a few summers, and it was fun to kind of loiter nearby and watch angry tourists sort it all out with the cops.
Tndnr82@reddit
" Not including actual crimes..." Everyone proceeds to post actual crimes 😂🤣😂🤣
galtscrapper@reddit
Right? And we all did it.
Tndnr82@reddit
I did so many petty crimes. So cringe.
galtscrapper@reddit
I was a pyro. I didn't do arson, but I once "borrowed" some wooden matches from a convent, and set them on fire, and my brothers shirt caught fire. We found a different shirt, stuffed his in the car. Momz of course noticed immediately. She was not amused.
Tndnr82@reddit
Small acts of vandalism were my bread and butter.
All_Damn_Day@reddit
A lot of experiments with lighter fluid. Also jumping off second floor balconies, just to see if we could.
CockroachThese@reddit
Ride bikes around town and kick over trash cans
Throw rocks at each other
Ride my bike on dirt roads miles out of town without parents knowing
Made a pipe bomb, we just wanted to blow up a tree stump, we weren’t terrorizing anyone but each other.
SarcasticGirl27@reddit
Kids in my high school used to do a scavenger hunt. We’d be given a list of items to find around town & a team color. We had to find as many items & bring they to the elementary school down the road from our high school. Some of the things were stuff from our childhood that was usually still in our basements, once, we needed to fill a 2ltr bottle of Mountain Dew with urine. Extra points if your team was all female. There was this large neighborhood sign by the school with a curvise spelling of the neighborhood name- we all had to get a letter from the sign. The next year, we had to spray paint the neighborhood name. We had to spell Super-cali-fragil-istic-expi-ali-docious in scrabble tiles & the total points of the added tiles equaled the points we were awarded. It was always a fun night.
Bladley@reddit
Day after halloweeen we would drive around and take people’s pumpkins off their porch, load them into the back of my friend’s truck, then roll them down a street that was on an extremely steep hill.
RhodeReddit@reddit
That is so sophomoric. Lol, in other words, classic high school shenanigans — artless active mostly harmless mostly pointless goofiness. Love it 😆
Fabulous_Permit5276@reddit
Actual crimes though…
idrathern0tsay@reddit
BB Gun wars. No safety goggles, no padding. 2 pump limit on the pump air rifles. Got shot in the ass and shot a friend’s pinky finger which is what I could see around a tree from 20 yards away. Good times. Wow we were dumb.
Sherviks13@reddit
We couldn’t afford BB guns. We threw rocks at each other.
Md693@reddit
We did same what idiots we were
ProfessionalLeave335@reddit
So me and my friends weren't the only ones? We stopped when I took a bb 1 inch below my eye on my cheek.
External_Confident@reddit
Did you grow up in Rome, GA? 😅I shot my crush an inch from his eye. I quit playing BB gun battles after that.
scholarlyowl03@reddit
Dated a guy my parents forbid me to and drove to his house a few times a week in a city 20 miles away without them knowing for 2 years
BigMommaSnikle@reddit
Nice try Mom!
Squeegeeze@reddit
Exploring abandoned homes, abandoned ruins, houses under construction, etc. We never damaged anything, never made a mess, always took out our empties, and really just wanted to see. Did get chased by some angry security dogs at least once at once of the abandonedruins of a school. Came prepared with hamburgers the next time and the dogs let us explore after that.
I can look back now and see how reckless and illegal that was, we could have gotten so hurt, yet I will always have a soft spot for giant Dobermans.
Estilady@reddit
Playing in houses under construction.
StOnEy333@reddit
We used to climb the fence at the Jr High and go swimming at night.
Scary-Pressure6158@reddit
Not a chance in hell
swedething@reddit
We…. Eehh… threw shopping carts from the local supermarket in the river. And other stuff too. There was a church being built next to it, and we thought it be fun to see how big a splash one of their tiles would make. Big splash. So we had to make sure a lot of tiles made a big splash as well. They did. We still laugh about that, 40+ years later.
No shame. None at all.
FingerOptimal7412@reddit
Did Bubbles go and try to retrieve them do you know???
swedething@reddit
Nah, I guess not. They council cleaned the river up, now and then, so I guess they got the carts, but the tiles… they’re still there, I guess.
MartokSonofUrthog@reddit
Stole beer from my friend's fridge ( with the friend ) and took them up a treehouse when we were around 11. Used to rip off the local drug/variety store for baseball and fishing equipment. Gave money to local bums to buy 40s. Smoked a lot ( weed and cigarettes). Chewed tobacco. Broke into run down or abandoned buildings. Tagged.
We were little bastards, lol.
Wascally_Badger@reddit
Skateboarding, getting stoned in the woods behind myself. Stealing my dad's old Hustlers and then selling the to classmates. Collecting illegal ninja weapons. Always having a sketchbook on me in high school where I made comics of my classmates, or just drew insulting characatures of them. I pretty much hated my entire town and vice versa, so I had a lot of pent up anger, hence my marijuana use.
Potential_Ad1416@reddit
You said no actual crimes. If I got up to mischief, I was all in. Most of my stories are probably past the statute of limitation in my state, but I won't risk it! 🤣🤣
Oh but I can say, as a latch key kid, I sometimes forgot my keys over the years. My bestie throughout all of elementary school would help me break in every time. Shit...that's a crime. Wait, if it's my own house, it can't be. 😅
Empty_Nestor@reddit
I learned to break into my house when I was ten. After I moved out at 18, I moved around a lot and the first thing I did when I moved into a new place was figure out how to break in.
Potential_Ad1416@reddit
🤣🤣 cuz ya just never know. I cost my mom a fortune in screens & French window panes. Lol
Stubborn_Strawberry@reddit
No way. Taking it all to my grave.
FingerOptimal7412@reddit
I second this!!!!! If you were there, then you already know!
No-Meringue2388@reddit
Getting into the all-ages gay club in the mid-80s in Portland, Oregon. Dancing to goth industrial music and tripping on LSD. I think I passed out on a giant speaker?
Bubbly_Following7930@reddit
Nothing. I was a goody goody and afraid of my dad.
But now I want to do know - what did you do with the bowling balls?
seamusoldfield@reddit
Mostly drinking, actually. Got two misdemeanors for Minor in Possession (of alcohol) and one Minor Consumption. The police in my town had nothing to do but harass high-school kids. The police in my town still are pigs with too many guns and too little to do.
SoUpInYa@reddit
Stealing porn mags from the corner store by hiding them in the sunday paper
dylangaine@reddit
Grew up in NYC so mostly going to bars underage. Club 55 near Christopher Street always served us.
PeterPunksNip@reddit
I was too poor to afford a moped. So, as I had a knack for opening padlocks I used to "borrow" one for the night. I would go to the train station moped parking lot, choose a moped, use it to get around, then putting it back in place after having given the tank a refill
DonJovar@reddit
That's pretty wholesome.
ProfessionalLeave335@reddit
We used to make model rockets out of rolled up notebook paper and we'd stuff the tip with match heads. One went up, did a bunch of loops, and then crashed in the dry field and started quite a large fire.
Jebgogh@reddit
Skateboarding. That was my entry to petty crime. Sure the act itself in some places can be illegal. But for me, an enthusiast, it was all the other things that made it so much more crime ridden. Things like jumping fences to get into backyard pools. And things like stealing wood from construction sites to build ramps. Yes, I blame skateboarding. That was the reason behind my wayward youth.
macthulhu@reddit
Same here. In the 80's the fine for riding a skateboard downtown was $250. We liberated enough plywood to build a bunch of ramps in an old furniture factory we had access to. We added about 8 feet of vert to a quarter pipe built in to the wall, and covered the whole thing in faux marble tiles from a Sbarro remodeling job at the local mall. Never made it to the top of that thing, but it was fun trying. Over time, we accumulated dozens of railroad ties and curbs, and built a 40 foot rail out of 3 inch pipe about a foot off the ground. I left a lot of skin in that building, but it was the absolute center of the universe for a few years.
Beatrix_Kitto@reddit
Most of it was actually crimes. We rang door bells and ran away. Crank called radio stations, churches, newspapers, gas stations and made them announce dumb vulgar names on the PA system. Stole candy from the corner store just because we could.
Rode in the back of pickup trucks late at night when the driver was absolutely trashed. Muddied in creeks on private property until the vehicles had to be towed out. Played hide and seek at midnight in the cemetery.
Paid ‘adults’ to buy us kegs, liquor and have impromptu field parties. Drag racing on dark country roads.
We did a lot of dumb stuff that I’d be horrified if my kid had done half of it.
Alman54@reddit
I'm a father of three. I would never want my kids to repeat the shenanigans I got into at their age.
enriquedelcastillo@reddit
I just remember setting lots of fires and explosions off in the forest, which amazingly never hurt me or developed into something that got out of control. I was very lucky.
devilhead668@reddit
Tennis balls and cans ducted taped together and lighter fluid cannons. Roman candles taped to RC cars. Skyrockets inserted into straws that were taped to arrows, shot straight in the air. Um just regular arrows shot in the air. Flaming arrows into light fluid soaked whatever. Geez I think we might have been pyros. What the hell. We lived in a pretty populated suburb. Hahaha
These are the tip of the iceberg. Better stop now!!!
GetHimABodyBagYeahhh@reddit
Bottle rocket wars with PVC pipe "bazookas"?
Alman54@reddit
I was 15. One friend was 17 and another was 18. In 1985, they scored a case of beer, Miller Lite, and the three of us went out drinking in back country roads after midnight. We lived in a rural town, so we knew the back roads well.
We drank and drove all night long and had a blast. Came home late, and then in the morning my family went to church. I was still drunk, but managed to make it through the morning without my mom and dad suspecting anything.
Ever since then. I've hated Miller Lite. I can't look at a can without feeling nauseous. Miller Lite is terrible beer, and even worse forva 15 year old.
We did the nighttime drinking and partying a couple more times, and committed felonies like stealing mail and setting mailboxes on fire.
We were never caught, though. We were young and invincible, had money for gas, and our futures wide and bright.
I never became an alcoholic, but I did drink a lot in college. Years ago I stopped drinking beer because I just didn't like it. I'm a red wine drinker now. Socially.
Jokerchyld@reddit
Wait... actual crimes are the ones you got CAUGHT doing right? Or does it include the ones you didnt? 😁
GinormousHippo458@reddit
Or your actions which haven't passed statue of limitations.
RogersMrB@reddit
Yes. My mother was astounded to find out that that was something she taught me, that it's only a crime if caught.
MissUnshine69@reddit
Sneaking off campus to smoke a J
raerae1991@reddit
We had a smoking tree, it was in the parking lot and even teachers would be seen smoking there
Th1nk18@reddit
We used to hotbox unlocked cars in the parking lot of my HS. We also were friends with the security guard. He would take us to remote areas in the school to smoke up. Under the swimming pool, an old target shooting range were two of the spots. No wonder I can’t remember shit from those days!
DrKlahnsRightHandMan@reddit
General theft of signs, cones, orange barrels, small statues, and seasonal yard decorations. Usually we'd pile it on a random porch. Mailbox vandalism against particular teachers or other authority figures. A summertime favorite was cruising around in a Jeep with no top or doors and throwing water balloons at random people. These are all relatively petty crimes, although as an adult, I'd be furious about the mailbox in particular. On rainy days we'd sit idling in a parking lot along a major pedestrian side street at the local college. When pedestrians would get to just the right spot, we'd gun it out of the parking lot and hit the huge puddles along the curb next to them and absolutely drench them with muddy water. Dick move, but I don't think it's a crime.
raerae1991@reddit
I’m pretty sure the mailbox pranks are felony offenses, since the USPS is a federal agency
quarterlybreakdown@reddit
We stole old tires from behind the shed at school (located at the top of a hill) and rolled them down various streets. Also, lots of weed smoking. 😉
GhostWr1ter999@reddit
Used to supplement my meager salary at the video store by frequenting back door craps games in the Bronx. Hey, they were run by legitimate Italian businessmen who worked for other legitimate Italian businessmen. 😎
EC_Stanton_1848@reddit
Toilet papered houses at least once a month
infinitynull@reddit
No way narc. We're all smarter than that. Gen X takes no chances with statutes of limitations.
evilBogie666@reddit
Whoop whoop!! 5-0 alert! 5-0 alert!! 😂
Always_the_answer@reddit
I cannot believe how dumb I was. Never got caught. Never got hurt - somehow. I really should not be here, at least not with all of my limbs and digits.
raerae1991@reddit
Toilet paper, kids don’t do that anymore, and apparently that’s now considered to be misdemeanor vandalism if you’re caught
brockclan216@reddit
Shoplifting. It was a competitive sport for me, my sister, and my friends. And why I got arrested 😂😂
prolific_illiterate@reddit
I got nothing. They were all criminal acts.
CTTK421@reddit
This one time at band camp... err... wrong sub.. lol. Probably did more than I care to recall, and too many to count.
StickyCarpet@reddit
switching the salt and sugar in the teacher's lunchroom
Flowerdriver@reddit
I'm pretty sure they were all crimes.
cajunjoel@reddit
I never burned down houses or started a forest fire, but damn did I like setting stuff on fire.
Flowerdriver@reddit
I'm 46 and still love fire!
Jamescg1972@reddit
Just drinking…way too young, way too often and way too much.
Remember celebrating my elder brother’s 18th in the pub. I’ll have been 13. Sat in an alcove at the back of the pub with my other siblings drinking pints of red stripe.
Won’t have been the first time. Or last time. It was the ‘80s in the UK. It was fine. No one cared.
AdMountain6203@reddit
I was a prankster and did a lot of different ones. Since it's Easter season, I'll share one from Easter in 3rd grade. Our school had egg spinning contests, where we decorated Easter eggs and then whole grade had contests in the gym to see who could spin their egg for the longest. After the contest, I put my cracked hard-boiled egg in a margarine container and hid it behind some books in my homeroom classroom that no one read. It got good and stinky, and it wasn't discovered for days after it started to stink.
I loved it. I've done more elaborate pranks, but sometimes it was the simple ones that gave me the most joy.
fongaboo@reddit
Was just talking about this last night. Our E.T.-style childhood out on bikes all day till our parents called us for dinner evolved into play armies split into two factions amongst all the kids in our neighborhood.
Larami battery-powered Uzi-workalike water guns were standard issue. Some of us mounted them to the frame of our bikes. I took two cardboard tubes (think Mr. Brady's plans) and a bungee cord and managed to make a 'bazooka' that launched water balloons. During the winter we would construct snow forts on opposite sides of the street, and hunker down like WWI soldiers in trenches hurling snowballs at each other like grenades.
Eventually tensions rose to a point that my faction "raided" the house of a latchkey kid in the other faction and trashed the place. I think there was a kerfuffle where one of my guys threw that kid to the ground.
His parents called the police. The next day, we were all called into the police station which doubled as the town hall. Nothing formal but the chief just gave us all a stern talking to. I remember my dad flipping out on the ride over there, screaming at me that I was going to have a "J.D. card".
Bk_Punisher@reddit
Junior high school, stink bombs, getting into restricted areas (we stole a set of teachers keys) Found a book room and sprayed them all with the fire extinguisher then stuck the hose under the grade advisors door and gave it a few squirts. We made it to the roof one day and the main power room. One of the guys wanted to kill power to the building but I convinced him it was too much. This was in the mid 80s Got in trouble and had my parents notified. Eventually the principle knew me by my first name. 🤷🏻♂️
freddymeyers1@reddit
There was/still is a small public Library Around the corner from where I lived. It had a push-button delivery bell on the outside of the double door entrance,near the side.They(the library) dismantled it but did not remove the wires. Whenever we were bored we'd twist the wires together and run across the street to watch the chaos.The bell was fire-alarm loud and wouldn't shut off till the wires were split. AND they never cut the wires so we'd do this whenever we felt like.good times
stigbugly@reddit
10 years old, on vacation in the LA area visiting my aunt and cousins. My cousins and I were cruising around a parking lot on our bikes (I had borrowed one). We had some smoke bombs in our pockets and we’re trying to figure out what cool stuff to do with them. Found a car with the windows partway down and decided to throw one into the car since it was the same color as the smoke bomb. Lit it, threw it in and the inside of the car caught fire almost immediately. We ran (rode) away as fast as we could. Fortunately for us, this was in the mid 70s and there were no cellphones.
spintool1995@reddit
Playing strip poker in a convent with my church youth group.
hedge36@reddit
Rearranging construction barriers at night to funnel cars down inescapable dead-ends was always a good time.
ZandarrTheGreat@reddit
We stole the sawhorse kind with flashing lights to prank someone’s front lawn. 1. Surprisingly heavy, especially when trying to hop out of a van quickly. 2. Ridiculously bright when in the back of a van. There is zero chance of getting away if anyone saw us. Laughed for hours.
NerdfestZyx@reddit
Jumping from garage roof to garage roof for the entire block
PenTestHer@reddit
Toilet papered a cop’s cruiser while it was parked in his driveway.
Pinkbeans1@reddit
We all had the same key to our crown vics. We used to turn on the sirens of other agencies. They don’t sound if the engine’s off. So when they’d hop in their cars after 3:30am lunch, they’d turn on their cars and WHOOOP!!
I’d also spray cheap perfume in some of the players’ cars.
Yes I was easily amused. I am still easily amused.
Ok-Street7504@reddit
My friends dad had an old international pickup truck at Christmas time when people would dump their trees out front for pickup we took as many as we could fit and dumped at another friend's house, look like they had a forest in their front yard.
Inattendue@reddit
This is actually hilarious. I suspect Other Friend’s Dad wasn’t quite as amused. But it’s funny AF. That’s when you wish there was a Candid Camera Moment happening.
Ok-Street7504@reddit
Ironically they weren't pissed off, they got a kick out of it . They took pictures in front of them and send it out as Christmas card the following year. It eventually became our hangout house because the parents were tolerant of all of our teenage behavior. 20 years later I worked for a guy who was big socially in the community he lived in and needed to get back at somebody who hung a Taco Bell coming soon sign from his garage door. I told him about the Christmas trees and he and his brother went out at Christmas time and loaded up with trees dropped him off in front of the guy's house.
PowerNinja5000@reddit
Well, it's not PC, but whore tours. Don't jump all over me for saying that, it's just what it was called, I didn't invent it.
Stealing random shit from construction sites, like signs and cones. Stealing car parts, like side mirrors and hubcaps. I guess those are crimes...
Waiting until parents were asleep and taking their car for joyrides. Friends would do the same and we'd have races through the neighborhood side streets and alleys and stuff. Really surprised we never crashed, tbh.
hedge36@reddit
Our thing was to hotwire equipment on job sites (if we didn't already have keys) and re-park them as large puzzles that had to be carefully unraveled the next morning. Like five excavators with intertwined booms that had to be pulled apart in a specific order. Or just park them waaaaaay across the site, far from where they were expected to be.
InfectiousDs@reddit
No way narc.
HypergolicHyperbola@reddit
For us, lots of driving go-carts and mini bikes on the streets and utility rights of way. Once old enough to drive, we would drive to other cities and towns to check out their burger joints and cafes. We never got carded for cigs or alcohol. Oh, and lots of trespassing. We were doing urbex before it had a name.
Chance-Night3198@reddit
Lots of fireworks on this thread!
In highschool a friend had a house that was up on a hill and looked down onto his neighbor's pool. We spend a lot of time shooting bottlerockets into that pool. Everything was surrounded by desert and we're lucky we didn't burn the neighborhood down.
And in college, I would buy bottle rockets back home where they were legal and bring them back to school with me. We'd drive around campus in the middle of the night, shooting them off and dodging from security. It was only a crime if you got caught--and we never did.
hedge36@reddit
We used to run around town switching letters around on signs. At one point we graduated to drilling pop rivets out of the larger ones, making our edits and then popping new rivets in. Irritating for business owners, but often damn funny. Hard to pull off without getting busted since it was usually night and the signs were almost always lighted.
secrerofficeninja@reddit
I know a guy who was maybe 17 at the time and I was maybe 13-14 and he would go into Western Auto and purchase copper tubing, gun powder and fuses all in a single purchase then make pipe bombs and blow stuff up on his farm.
This was around 1983 probably. He lived on the farm next to a cousin of mine. I witnessed one of his explosions.
RandoMcNoob@reddit
Putting coat hanger traps in the middle of the road after sneaking out of my friend's house in the dead of night. It was really dumb.
Nice-Zombie356@reddit
I can guess, but can’t find confirmation online. What’s a coat hangar trap? Just a tangle to get stuck on cars?
heat2051@reddit
We were pretty bad kids in High School. Lots of drinking, big bags of weed, large house parties, sneaking out, un safely fraternizing with the opposite sex, finding hacks to skip school without getting caught etc. One memory that sticks out...My friends and I started a mailbox baseball league that lasted for a few weeks. After lopping off the mailboxes, we would stop and collect all of them into the trunk. We had a storage area behind our high school in the woods. We decided to quit while we were ahead when we heard the police were tasked with finding out who was doing it. About a week later, someone found the mailboxes in the woods. The article in the paper said the police officers interviewed found over 300 back there. Needless to say we retired our bats.....
LONGVolSilver@reddit
Do kids today even know how to play with matches? I did.
Acceptable_Mirror235@reddit
Skipping school and smoking cigarettes . Not too exciting .
grayhairedqueenbitch@reddit
I was a mostly good kid, but there were moments. Shoplifting, underage drinking (and driving), public nudity...
AppointmentMountain8@reddit
My sister's helped me sneak a boy into my room just to see if we could get away with it. He stayed for an hour then jumped out my window onto the roof of my dad's car and rode his bike home. Only reason we got away with it is my mom worked overnight shift and dad never checked on us like she did. Oh the glorious 80's.
No-Estimate999@reddit
The parent in me cringes! Haha
No-Estimate999@reddit
Hiding in a he bathroom at the Cinema so we could watch more movies.
DanimusMcSassypants@reddit
We were horrible children. Some favorite activities include: stealing Halloween decorations (usually including those big pumpkin bags filled with leaves) off a bunch of houses’ lawns, and stacking them all up in front of the door of some friends’ house.
Stacking all the picnic tables in the local parks and festival areas into giant pyramids.
Walking the streets plucking Big Wheels out of people’s yards until we had enough for all of us to have a slalom race down the steepest, windiest hill in the area.
Taking giant inner tubes from the local trucking company lot, and then riding them blindly through the runoff sewers after a storm.
BB gun wars. One of my friends recently had a previously unknown BB show up on a shoulder x-ray.
None of us should’ve survived a lot of it. But, boy was it fun!
BabadookOfEarl@reddit
The thing about BB gun wars is we all knew what a terrible idea it was at the time.
DanimusMcSassypants@reddit
And yet… Had we not been morons not almost shooting one another’s eyes out, we probably could’ve invented airsoft.
BabadookOfEarl@reddit
Sneaking into campgrounds and taking people’s beer at night.
A bunch of people in our area has swish barrels that we could usually get a bit of stuff from.
Breaking into abandoned houses.
gholmom500@reddit
While I was decorating for prom, friends borrowed my car to get sodas. They were gone too long
In my car was nearly every tulip in our small town. They filled my little Mustang. I lived outside of town, which had way too many cops. I had to drive it from the high school near the center, and then several miles out with evidence.
The escapade did make the paper, with several residents reporting to the police that teens in a white car were stealing flowers.
omegared138@reddit
I was telling some stories to a co-worker who was in his early twenties, he was absolutely dumbfounded. Same with stories I tell my kids , they're just surprised that we went places and did all kinds of crazy things with no adults.
coffeefueled@reddit
Nope. Not incriminating myself. There's no evidence and any purported witnesses are guilty of whatever we may or may not have done in the before times.
Once in a while I'll tell my spouse a story of the shenanigans we used to get up to and she is always shocked.
Emotional_Mess261@reddit
We soaked a dead woodchuck in liquid manure and left it in the mailbox of a super bitch. I lived in the middle of nowhere
SavoirFaire2Middling@reddit
The second sentence is superfluous, to be honest.
CelebrationOk4140@reddit
I’m just wondering where someone would find liquid manure? And a dead woodchuck for that matter.
Mistervimes65@reddit
Actual crimes. Mostly street racing on country roads. That 1969 rally sport would break 100 on the straight away.
Soulshiner402@reddit
When I first moved to LA in the early 80’s, I used to drive around Beverly Hills and Brentwood and crash parties. Kicked out of about 80% immediately, but there were some where I actually made some friends
highnumber@reddit
Is your name Randy?
killerchef69@reddit
Shit purse! 1. Fill a big old purse full of horse shit. 2. Place purse on the edge of a moderately busy road with a good place to observe covertly (after dark of course) 3. Watch cars stop, back up and grab purse and take off, then slow or stop and throw out the purse (cussing loudly) 4. Laugh uproariously. 5.rinse, repeat! Hours of wholesome fun!
CelebrationOk4140@reddit
This is amazing 🤣
bbonerz@reddit
I'm dead
zalurker@reddit
Riding in the storm drains with our BMX's. Making vinegar and baking soda bombs. Getting our hands on a Playboy. (No mean feat in 1980's South Africa.)
And because it was Apartheid South Africa with its border wars and militarized police force - Getting our hands on army issue signal flares, and stun grenades. (Among things)
Borrowing my uncle's Army Reserve FAL rifle to shoot cane rats when they burn the fields. In hindsight .22 rimfire was a better option. They basically vaporized
The 80's was fun.
mustardmadman@reddit
I liked to eat more than 2500 calories a day and stay up past my bedtime and watch pg-13 movies
SeeCopperpot@reddit
My cousins and I would throw hay bales down out of the loft of the barn and then jump into the haystack, at least once a season. It was really a high jump and incredibly dangerous. Also we never got in trouble but I know it was an awful lot of work to get that hay baled and up into a loft, we knew it then too, it was kind of an asshole move TBH.
cs1013@reddit
Hockey sticks and tennis balls soaked in gas or lighter fluid made for great nighttime street hockey.
FlamingDragonfruit@reddit
Breaking into the park after it was closed late at night, to go tobogganing with friends.
AdGold205@reddit
TPing and egging houses (before TP and eggs became too expensive.)
MNPS1603@reddit
We did a lot of TP, we thought it was soooo funny. My friends parents had a company where they constantly shredded documents, so we got the bright idea to TP AND spread shredded documents everywhere too. We were jerks, I can admit it now. I remember suddenly my house started getting hit, and my dad would be IRATE with me because it was obviously something I had done to make me a target. Then towards the end of the year my mom met another kids parent at some school event and she told mom that my friends and I had done their house multiple times that year. So mom came home embarrassed, so she and dad had a meltdown on me and let’s just say that was the end of my TP artistry.
sane-asylum@reddit
Hurricane Isabel, 2003 (I think, my friends and I were all in Chesapeake, VA when the hurricane hit and we were way older than teens. One of the things we did was steal those huge rolls of TP from the bathroom and actually TPd the hotel a couple blocks away from our rooms. I will neither confirm nor deny that a large amount of liquor was stolen from the bar and a large amount of sodas and water as well. I will also not confirm the illegal poker games the fire marshall shut down in the hallway. It’s funny though, I was a really good kid and a pretty good adult
dichotomyditch@reddit
I think your question is super difficult without without including crimes. How about just no violence or physical harm? I grew up in the sticks and we used to play mailbox baseball but with a shotgun instead of a bat...at 15...while driving without a license. I think there's at least 3 or 4 crimes in there but we defo weren't out there knocking out strangers for tik tok clout.
skinisblackmetallic@reddit
Actual crimes, mostly.
Bright-Form730@reddit
We drove around/cruised a lot. I had a Camaro that the license plate folded down for access to the hatch in back. We’d fold it down and do gas runs. Also did a few beer runs too.
Active_Shopping7439@reddit
Just crimes
CelebrationOk4140@reddit
My dad was pretty pissed when the neighbors’ nativity scene baby Jesus miraculously showed up at our kitchen table for breakfast one cold Sunday morning. He sheepishly returned it, but I’m surprised he didn’t make me show up, Christ under my arm and hat in hand, to return the plastic infant savior.
saxdiver@reddit
Stealing cigarettes out of cars on my early morning paper route. Breaking windows out of old sheds.
Ahem allegedly
Walts_Ahole@reddit
Moved a buddy's car into their backyard, took quite a few of us. Bottle rocket & bb gun fights.
Put switches on our cycles to shut off the front or rear lights to ride the highways at night. Found a guy laying in the middle of the road one night. Scared the hell out of us, couple guys stayed in case a car came, I got my dad & he figured the guy was drunk. Cops came, guy was drunk but Das pushed out of his car going down the highway by some random guy who offered to get him home, then stole his car.
Before tannerite we had to make do with screw pipe, magic powder & safety fuse to make things fly that weren't meant to fly. Acetylene cannons were fun too. We made a helluva racket growing up on the farm. Holy shit I could go on for hours, likely need beer to jog my memory
Cozy_Minty@reddit
In Arizona there are things called washes that are like rivers with no water in them. They only turn into rivers during monsoon season, when there are floods. So picture a riverbed carved into the earth like the grand canyon on a small scale.
These washes can't be blocked due to the floodwater, so when a building needs to be built on top of one, they turn it into a concrete tunnel. There was one such tunnel that went underneath the mall. I basically lived in this tunnel all 4 years of high school. We would spend all day down there running around doing dumb kid stuff like smoking pot and playing with ouija boards. The portions of the tunnel that were underneath the parking lot had drainage grates in the ceiling, we sat under those for light. No one ever brought a flashlight, to get to them we walked a long time in the pitch dark.
I don't know how I didn't get bitten by a black widow or even worse hanging out down there. I would never go down there now it feels way too dangerous.
davidsladky@reddit
0 was raised by Grandma and she didn't play
Potential_Chicken_72@reddit
TP-ing someone’s house and ding dong dash lol
Longjumping-Comb3080@reddit
Used to throw pot seeds under the tables in the greenhouse at the school farm. Got kicked out of the strip club for being too drunk and obnoxious. I was a 16 year old girl! I was involved with stealing a big cylinder of nitrous. That was an interesting adventure. Lol Pretty much everything we did was illegal in southwestern Oklahoma back then and probably still is. That's not even a drop in the bucket of the crap I did as a teenager in the 80's. Lol
Areia@reddit
Grew up in Europe, so my friends and I would got out to bars when we were in high school. I convinced my grandmother (who raised me) to let me stay at a specific friend's house after these bar crawls, because she lived walking distance from downtown. Grandma thought this was fine because she (thought she) knew the friend's dad and he seemed like a decent guy.
Little did she know that the dad would also go out drinking on those nights and did not care when we got back. His only request was that if we came home late enough that the bakeries were open, we should pick up breakfast pastries on the way. Often he'd come home later than we did. Many mornings we all sat down for brunch together: me, my friend, her dad, and whatever lovely woman he'd met at a bar the night before. A different one every time.
My grandma never found out.
Familiar-Court-4217@reddit
I shot my b.b. gun at the neighbors window, my father was pissed.
ZakanrnEggeater@reddit
nice try, Dad/Mom 😏
74MoFo_Fo_Sho_Yo@reddit
My favorite was unrolling condoms on windshield wipers 🤣😂
Informal_Phrase4589@reddit
Swing on a swingset in a neighborhoods yard and it fell over and we ran away
Double_Sweet_3404@reddit
I was not a naughty kid for the most part. The worst I did was toilet papering houses on Halloween.
Legal-Western5580@reddit
Well if we can't include actual crimes I'm out 🤷🏻♂️
chrimen@reddit
Hmm inquiring minds want to know..
docfallout22@reddit
Graffiti; a LOT of it. Still good with a can. 😉
Getting on to the roof of various businesses (chiefly supermarkets) just because.
Dropping pennies onto people from the upper levels at the mall; wouldn’t hurt, was cheap and people always are shocked by pennies landing on or near them.
Group of friends and I would harass security at a Kaiser hospital until they would chase us in their golf carts. We thought they couldn’t leave the property, because they’d stop whenever we ran across the street to a large park. However, 1 night a younger guy didn’t stop at the “safe” line, and instead drove over the white pylons and chased us into the park…which is how we found out the pylons were plastic and not metal. 🤣
Learned how to rig some games/attractions (like the whiffle ball batting cage) at a large arcade in a mall so we could play for free.
Break into a local public pool to swim at night.
That’s the more tame stuff I can think of/remember.
Dazzling-Walrus9673@reddit
We went around one night and stuck maxi pads to a bunch of stop signs. We were bored. 🤣
gcpuddytat@reddit
Nice try, Dad - I will never tell !!
Wide_Insurance_5310@reddit
Stole beer from open garages
Status-Effort-9380@reddit
I lived on the campus of a private high school. The gym was open most of the time. There was a snack machine in there. With our small hands, us kids could reach up into the machine and “jip” it to get it to release free snacks. It was risky - we could get caught by adults so we had to do it when the coast was clear, and I think the operation itself was tricky and scary, but if successful we could get several free candy bars.
regalbeagles1@reddit
Shot bottle rockets from the bushes at kids in 7th grade.
Traveled the neighborhood on a moped throughout the summer of 4th grade. My Mom insisted that I have an orange flag flying from the back “for safety”.
Bitter-Assignment464@reddit
We used to swap lawn ornaments in neighborhoods. Sometimes a street over. Or moving a dozen or so lawn ornaments to one house. A few times we used to take bags that a homeowner took all weekend to fill full of leaves. Then open them and dump back all over the yard. We only did this so bad neighbors. The guy we did it to the most used to always yell at his wife. Tie a bunch of bags full of leaves to the car bumper of a neighbor with very thick salt water fishing line. Standing at the bus stop in the morning and watching that same car dragging a bunch of bags down the road was just hilarious to us.
A neighbor did a job removing clean fill for a guy and the guy never paid him. We went back at 1 in the morning and put the dirt back onto his lawn.
We also used to drive around and move peoples trash cans when they were out and just leave them wherever. The funniest line we ever heard was from a guy still taking the trash down to the curb (We didn’t know this) “hey that’s my trash” “what the fuck”.
Setup a mannequin fully clothed just outside of the street light coverage on the road and a bike lying next to it. We would then tie fishing line to it and move a leg or arm when a car came by. We were called some pretty colorful names. This was not appreciated.
Bosanova_B@reddit
I had some fiends that did the lawn ornament thing as well.
Excellent-Gap2352@reddit
We sold TP insurance, around Halloween and homecoming, and summer, would clean up any house that got hit, funny how some houses were hit and the others did not, always paid for small luxuries lol
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
I believe this is called racketeering. Apparently, creating a protection racket just naturally happens.
Excellent-Gap2352@reddit
That it does and thankfully our large peace force of 5, knew who we all were lol but never seemed to get caught bigger fishes
sixteenHandles@reddit
Homemade fireworks were great. Initially I deconstructed Estees model rocket engines and ground up the solid propellant. Then I just learned how to make black powder.
You could order industrial fuse back then. Idk if you still can.
Blowing stuff up was fun. My bro had the anarchists cookbook.
Bosanova_B@reddit
BB gun fights. Trespassing into the town lumber yard. There were a few times I dressed head to toe in camo and covered my face an head with olive green bandanas so that only my eyes were visible and stumped around my small town with a tall ass walking stick. Freaked out a few friends one night in our local park. I also got chased by the cops dressed up like that. I was able to sneak in to a culvert and wait it out till they left.
Automatic-Evidence26@reddit
Criminal Activity
Sufficient_Stop8381@reddit
I was just trying to score
FlatSixFun@reddit
Women or drugs?
Sufficient_Stop8381@reddit
Yes
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
The only motivation that kept me on the straight and narrow.
artchickennugget@reddit
I was an equipment tech for the football team in high school. We were a crew of like six girls that helped the coaches and trainers, so we had keys to everything. We hid a Mr Microphone in the guy’s locker room, essentially bugging it for weeks. We could monitor their conversations on a radio from the room next to it. It took them weeks to figure it out, mostly because we were relentlessly mocking about the stuff we heard.
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
Leave it to the girls to have the most technologically advanced crime listed here!
Tired_o_Mods_BS@reddit
We "procured" enough wood from various construction sites in the middle of the night to build ourselves a 4x8 mini half pipe in my buddy's backyard. That probably falls under the crime caveat, though. We pirated every Sierra game and other software and then downloaded the cracks to play them for free. Shit, that was probably a crime, too. We downloaded a text copy of the Anarchist Cookbook that might have been legal! Mostly a lot of climbing fences into closed schools to skateboard (or find holes in the fence).
dubgeek@reddit
Stole a Christmas tree from the grocery store I worked at. Aside from that I was a boring teenager.
NervousImpression623@reddit
Parties mostly, lots and lots of parties with assorted underage drinking, bud, blow, and often held at dubious locations.
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
I remember trying to go to one of those parties, so we went to someone's nearby apartment because it had a view of the field that the party was supposed to be in. They did a good job, we couldn't even find them.
monsterbot314@reddit
Got in trouble on the bus for something, dont even remember what. The driver made me come sit near the front so we could go to the principles office. She got distracted driving the rest of the way there and when she wasn’t looking I took my jacket off and quickly switched seats. When we got to the school she couldn’t identify who it was and NO ONE out of the 20+ kids on the bus ratted me out , not even when she got the principle and he started threatening us with in school suspension. I was amazed really lol. Felt like the coolest kid in school that day!
lottalitter@reddit
We wrote “This is a hold up” on the backs of a stack of withdrawal slips at a bank. Graffiti that included stuff like “Charles Manson is a fox!” and “I love Jim Jones”
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
Oh great, next time I'm at the bank I have to fight the intrusive thought to write " this is a holdup " on the back of the unused bank slips in front of me.
Rich_Group_8997@reddit
I couldn't get up to much because my dad and a couple uncles were cops, and I kept running into cops who knew them (and the commissioner was an old school buddy of my mom's, so he would have whooped my ass too) 😭 My bestie is a minister's kid, so we tried our best to keep our mischief low-key. Lots of booze fueled parties at the parsonage though, because her folks were never home.
There was the one night my bestie and i met a couple guy friends in town and headed back to my friend's place with a stop at a local park on the way. I was driving up the highway while the other three were passing around a bottle of whisky (i didn't join them). At one point I had to tell them to put the bottle down and look normal as a cop drove past us. 3 of us were 19-20 and the other was 28.
Later that night, we got stopped and ejected from a public park because we were there after hours. While i was standing against a wall with a spotlight in my face, I saw my life flash before my eyes. I thought I was going to get locked up for trespassing (along with my three drunk friends) and that my folks were going to kill me. 🤣 We were allowed to go free and my folks didn't find out about it until years later.
yanknga@reddit
My friend and I taped a centerfold to a speed sign in our neighborhood. The sign was next to an elementary school so as the buses pulled out, the kids all got an eyeful. We were amazed at how many cars drove by it yet nobody stopped to take it down.
That friend ended up being sent away to a bad boys school in North Georgia.when, in HS, he became a serious stoner. By then we’d parted ways as drugs weren’t for me (per Nancy -I just said no).
Ok-Commercial-924@reddit
The day I finished 8th grade a bunch of us got in the back of one of the older kids truck with 2 trash cans full of water balloons, we drove around town (2 stop light hick town) throwing them at anyone we saw. Unfortunately we also threw them at the local fruit stand. That got the cops called on us.
Funny_Obligation2412@reddit
In high school from time to time I would drop 2 bottles of dish soap in a fountain that was really close to our main street. The soap suds would end up going onto main street.
At work I use to work overnight in a tech company in the 90's. We would play lan games like counter strike and rogue spear. If the day managers would have seen us we would of been fired for sure.
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
Doing tech support in the mid-90s, we had to cover for another office in a later time zone, so we were allowed to work up to midnight. This was with the understanding that we could play the original Quake LAN on the company computers.
This was probably my favorite gaming experience of my life. An amazing amount of cooperation and coordination amongst a group of young men to get all of the systems ready to go at midnight on the dot, and then the mad scramble to get all the computers back to normal settings, leaving no evidence of our gaming by 7:50am, just 10 minutes before the morning crew would come in.
Funny_Obligation2412@reddit
Lol we also would play quake paintball
ConsuelaShlepkiss@reddit
Does drinking beer before school and smoking weed in the restroom count?
SaltyMiniMiner@reddit
Most were crimes, but we use to go a local park and untie and release all their rental paddle and row boats and kick them loose into the middle of the lake.
Use to let the air out of tires on cars, often 2 tires caddy-corner to each other so you could teeter-totter the car. Thought that was hilarious.
Economy_Field9111@reddit
Not including actual crimes...
Aw, c'mon, ya fucken square. I had to pay for my smokes somehow.
wrathofimpermanence@reddit (OP)
To be fair, if everybody's doing it, is it really a crime?
Apparently, everyone in our generation was just constantly committing crimes.
LastCookie3448@reddit
I made the best fake schools IDs our dean had ever seen. Anything to avoid the cafeteria at lunch. 😆😂😂😂
wicked_pissah_1980@reddit
Poured a bottle of Thai hot sauce in the communal ketchup in high school on spicy fry day. Like burn your face off hot. Sat back and watched the cafeteria burn.
Ok-Maize-284@reddit
Diabolical! 🔥
Without_Portfolio@reddit
This isn’t me, it’s a friend.
When he was an exchange student in the UK, he and a few buddies decided one night to do the very smart thing of jumping from roof to roof in an industrial area of some unnamed city.
At one point he stepped onto a roof that wasn’t solid. He fell through it, only a few feet, and landed on top of a car inside what turned out to be a locked garage.
The room was locked, and either the garage door itself was locked or he couldn’t figure out how to open it. For a while he considered just sleeping there and dealing with it in the morning, but he was convinced he’d get arrested for trespassing and sent back to the U.S.
Then he noticed a set of keys hanging on the wall, tried them on a few cars, and was able to start the one directly behind the garage door.
It took a few rams, but he managed to smash the car through the garage door, drove out, tossed the keys back onto the seat, and ran off into the night.
He never heard anything about it afterward.
DonJohn520310@reddit
There was a restaurant by my house kind similar vibe to Hooters we'll say. My friends and I found the completely unsecured master breaker switch in a back alley and used to turn it off every once in a while and watch everybody have to come outside. We we're actually pretty smart about it, and would only do it like maybe once a month, finally after about 6 months they got around to locking it up.
dsteazy80@reddit
Technically a crime, but I lived in a subdivision and did my fair share of house egging and TPing with other neighborhood hoodlums.
NoIamthatotherguy@reddit
Toilet papering, under age drinking and mailbox baseball. Crimes really...
NihilsitcTruth@reddit
None, I avoid any interactions with adults especially police. We went to the woods or ball parks at night. Anywhere people didn't go regularly. Drank, smoked up etc and sometimes had a fire, sat chilled talked then went to a designated house. 2 of the parents were do what you want but do it here where we can watch you at least. Good times
ZebraBorgata@reddit
Hey is this the grandson of the rent-a-cop that could never catch us back in the 80s?
Jef_Wheaton@reddit
While delivering our newspapers, my best friend and I would...
Write "MOO!" on stuff.
In CHALK.
3 of us would also cause mischief in the walk-through "Fun House" at the amusement park. It's a big, wooden boat that rocks back and forth, themed to Noah's Ark. There's one spot where you're in the "mountain" and the walkway has an open part, up above the sidewalks.
We would shout, "Obscenities, Profanities, and Vulgarities!" from that lofty perch. (Yes, that's a quote.)
We also wore MATCHING GREEN TIGER-STRIPED HATS.
We were VANDALS! Common HOOLIGANS!
thekermiteer@reddit
We learned a few years ago that my husband and his friends are still legends back at our old high school, because they once discovered that a teacher had left his small, manual transmission car unlocked, and managed to get it rolled into the gym.
Same group planted their class year in corn in front lawn of the school (they fought it growing back for years), and once rounded up all the real estate “for sale” signs they could, and planted those in front of the school, too.
They were nice kids, smart kids, but bored and ornery in our rural area.
OldDude1391@reddit
We would steal the real estate signs and put them in random yards.
Glittering-Return-42@reddit
The class before me stole a huge Buffalo statue from a local restaurant / campground. After it was found they secured it a lot better.
Independent-Slip568@reddit
All the replies have actual crimes so far looool
railworx@reddit
Tbf almost everything is a crime now
MisterSandKing@reddit
Tossed stink bombs all around my middle school. They canceled class. lol
Used to take our bike on top of the high school, and ride around like idiots.
Used to ride bikes through the mills when people were working, and ride through people’s gardens. Yeah, we were ass hats. Lmao!
littleoctagon@reddit
A friend and I went to the Monroeville mall (same mall from first Dawn of the Dead) and spiked every fountain with some gray powder that turned the water purple. Right after we did the last fountain, it turned off and we made book outta there. This was fall of 86 so maybe they had cameras?
NOGOODGASHOLE@reddit
Graffiti mostly. My biggest regret of my youth is not having a camera with me to photograph all the stuff I saw in the NYC subway tunnels
iowhite@reddit
Lots of late night trespassing, so many places. Weed was often involved. Many evenings spent out in the no man’s land beneath the giant transmission line towers drinking or having parties. I think of all the hijinks we had and it’s a miracle we never got caught and no one ever got hurt!
dth1717@reddit
My favorite was getting your cable remote from home and peeking in ppls windows and changing their channels
aogamerdude@reddit
Now that Walmart owns Vizio you can buy a replacement remote & it works on all Vizio TV's.
EnjoyingTheRide-0606@reddit
All of 8th grade, my younger brother and I snuck out at night. Like every night of the week! Once it started pouring on us and so much water came down! This was winter 1983, when a long drought in CA ended. It became so muddy, we couldn’t walk because the fields kept stealing our shoes! We were literally soaked to the skin. We couldn’t shower at 1:00 a.m. on a Tuesday! We finally got caught. But my brother had taken it too far by vandalizing a car owned by the parents of a classmate. I didn’t know there were times he and his friends would sneak out on weekends to do vandalism. The last time we snuck out, the family was waiting up and called the police. I managed to hide. He and his friend were hauled off to the police station!
La_Mano_Cornuta@reddit
Let's just say we tried various items out of the Anarchist Cookbook when my friend got ahold of a physical copy of it.
iowhite@reddit
When our catholic highschool first got computers with internet me and a friend managed to find this on usenet and we hid a copy on every computer so we could read it when we supposed to be listening to the teacher. We learned a lot!
Taodragons@reddit
Same. Honorable mention to "Poor man's James Bond".
diedforyourzyns@reddit
Driving home late one night down a dark country road, we crossed over a river bridge and noticed people camping down the bank a ways. We turned off the car lights and backed up real slow. There was a large rock by the side of the road so we picked it up then my friend screamed bloody murder and we chucked the rock off the bridge into the water. We could see the campers scrambling up the bank as we squealed the tires and sped away.
vulcangod08@reddit
My favorite prank.
A buddy of ours had a Jeep wrangler and left it at school when they went on a choir trip.
So we pulled the carpet and put sardines underneath.
We also loaded the inside with packing peanuts and zipped it all back up.
He thought the peanuts were the prank.
I remember driving by his house a day or two later and he had the seats out of his Jeep trying to find the smell.
blade944@reddit
Lol. Nearly every example so far has been an actual crime.
I did nothing bad. Yeah, that's the ticket. In fact, I only did really good stuff like helping old ladies. At least that's what my parents thought.
SignificantTransient@reddit
We discovered empty co2 cartridges and stepdads gunpowder made something way better than an m80
mden1974@reddit
Amateur bomb making skills that would make any ira terrorist proud
TeenYearsKillingMe@reddit
I mean, it's technically a crime...but we used to jump the fence in our neighborhood pool to go skinny dipping. From 16 to about 22, I always kept a bathing suit in my car for swimming, legal or not.
mden1974@reddit
We jumped the fence at the local park and swam every night from 12-1 am or later. For three summers in a row. There was even a security guard in a truck and we’d have contests on who could sneak up to the back and touch it and slink away.
mjh8212@reddit
We broke into the newspaper boxes without paying and took the newspapers out replacing them with the free newspapers and putting the ones you pay for in the free spot.
MuddyPig168@reddit
Crank calls
DocDerry@reddit
There was a frito lay warehouse distribution center next to a coca-cola distribution center. We would hop the fences and help ourselves to the unlocked trucks. Until the put barbed wire at the tops of the fence.
Then we would go under the fence.
AbsoluteBeginner1970@reddit
Growing weed in my granddads greenhouse and selling it to classmates
Every-Mousse6228@reddit
We had train tracks running through our small town because we had this potato processing plant, so they were technically active but hardly ever any traffic. So my friends and I would spend the day wandering up and down the tracks, we had a little "club house" thing we built on the side in the woods, and when we came across any of the track spikes just laying around on the ground we would chuck them at things: like say roofs of potato warehouses.
mary_wren11@reddit
We were messing around in a graveyard, as teens do, and my friend found a dead crow. He hung it from the gate of the graveyard. It was one of those fancy iron gates with the arch that goes over the entry road. A few days later there was a little article in our local paper about signs of possible satanic activity at the graveyard (late 80s satanic panic times).
Eddie_Shark@reddit
Not me but some friends of mine broke onto an abandoned Lowes store with all the building materials still inside. They built a half pipe skate ramp. It was criminal. However, they only got a slap on the wrist with a no trespass warning. Great times!
MahonriWY@reddit
There was one home in my farming town of 100 people that was delivered several magazines each month in a black cover. One of us was brazen enough to walk into their house (no one locked their doors) and grab a few magazines from the magazine rack and walk out while they were gone. Word got around about the exact location in the woods where they were stashed. They weathered quickly, but for years we had a steady supply of porn in the woods. Parents found out, but the supplier would just change the wooden location. The owner of the magazines was kind of a hermit and never talked to anyone. Parents would scold him, but evidently he gave zero fucks.
TheKnightOfDoom@reddit
Smashed all the church windows at our youth club...not me but I was there.
Made a den in my Neighbours hedge, it was pristine and we made a massive hole in it.
Egged the local Morman church for a laugh.
There was a Victoria wine shop and me and me Brother used to climb over the wall at the back and nick a load of glass bottles and go into the shop and sell them back to them (5p) a bottle.
I could go on lol.
spammyzahn@reddit
Lots of car surfing going down US-50 or throwing golf balls and basketballs out the sun roof on the same stretch of road.
We used to take a bull rope and tie into the bed of my buddies truck and he’d cut doughnuts while you stand on the bumper and try to stay on with one hand on the rope.
1 Halloween we took toilet paper and strung it up on a bridge like it was a road closed gate and then watched people come flying down the road and lock their wheels up trying to stop before hitting it.
CheeseburgerSmoothy@reddit
When I was 11 my older stepbrother and I found an abandoned ice cream truck in a junkyard that kids had been using as a hangout. Inside there was an old couch, as well as old lighters and some cans of spray paint. So of course we made flamethrowers, and accidentally lit the couch on fire. We dropped everything and ran as the entire ice cream truck went up like a match. The next day I went back and the entire truck was destroyed, burnt to the frame with all the aluminum all melted. Nobody ever found out.
BasicallyLostAgain@reddit
At 12, got caught swimming in the fountain in front of the local courthouse. On a Sunday. Lol.
DMFD_x_Gamer@reddit
Nice try FBI
flabackyardgarage@reddit
None, because there is no proof!
doktorstilton@reddit
Tagging and other bad graffiti. I guess that's an actual crime though. Uh, one of us buying a movie ticket and then opening the back exit to let friends in.
UberBricky80@reddit
Is chucking a flaming head of lettuce in front of a moving bus a crime?