Six-year-old criminal mastermind
Sorry for being only tangentally related to the question - This story isn't so much about the thing I naively believed, which was pretty common, but about an unexpected result of that belief...

When I was in infant school, I went through a brief period of kleptomania - egged on by my gleeful bastard of an older brother, (as if that excuses me somehow.) One day a week at my school, we were encouraged to bring in a toy to play with - Most of the boys chose Star Wars figures, or Transformers, or one of He-Man's awful brigade of crap sidekicks. It was a day filled with joy, but also avarice: All these beautiful toys. All these toys I didn't own!

So, one of these days I happened to find myself in the cloakroom alone, with larcenous thoughts on my mind. With a criminal cunning that I seem to have entirely lost in the intervening years, I rifled through all the coats until I found something worth stealing: A red Tonka flatbed truck. It was amazing - I can still picture it today in all its shiny die-cast glory. I quietly hid it away, and at the end of the day managed to smuggle it all the way home without incident.

Victory! I'd learned a fantastic lesson: Stealing is easy! I was free to play with my spoils as much as I liked. And I did. The truck was the perfect size and weight to be launched along the landing and bounce solidly down the stairs just like I'd seen cars falling over cliffs do on TV so many times. It was a shame I couldn't make it explode into flames at the bottom, but on the plus side the truck survived the stunt so I could repeat it as many times as I liked. Which, it turned out, was an awful lot of times.

But there was a snag. It'd never occurred to me that my mum might have a pretty good idea of what toys I owned. So when, investigating the sound of me repeatedly knocking chunks of plaster off the landing wall, she asked, "Where did you get that truck?" I panicked.

Time froze; I simply wasn't prepared for the question. I had nothing - I couldn't admit to the truth, but I had no believable cover story to hand. I could say I borrowed it from a friend, but that would surely only lead to more questions, and I hadn't prepared the sufficient web of carefully considered lies to deal with that sort of cross-examination. All seemed lost.

But then! I had a flash of true genius. There was a single moment, a mere few weeks before, when in all the confusion a new toy could feasibly have passed unnoticed. I thought back to the day; there were loads of new toys, and she definitely wasn't paying full attention at the time. If the red truck had appeared at that moment, it would be entirely possible that she might not have noticed. This was my way out! A bullet-proof, entirely unverifiable back-story for my new illicit toy. I'd won! I'd outsmarted everyone! Smiling smugly, I picked up the truck and informed her:

"Father Christmas brought it for me."

My victim, and his furious mother, stood in stony silence as I recited my shame-faced apology the next day.
( Zoroastermouse thinks therefore he am, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 2:38, 1 reply)

This
This should fucking win. This is what QOTW is all about. Tangentality aside, this is brilliantly told, an excellent tale, and contains equal amounts of "Aww!", mirth, and shame. 10/10 good work Zoroastermouse well done.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 12:39, closed)