Glassware
You'd think coming off a council estate I'd be well versed in petty crime, and you'd be right. That said, I don't knowingly shoplift, and I'm one of those people who gets guilty when the shop alarms go off and I've paid for my goods like the upstanding citizen I am. However...

When I was studying in Manchester, I shared a flat with 3 geeks in a postgrad halls near Rusholme.

Being all geeky and studenty, we loved to go to the local pub and clear up on the pub quiz every Tuesday. It was good for two reasons - we'd always have a crate of beer for the week as our winnings, and we'd get to ogle the fit greek birds from the international halls across the road, despite having the social skills of a 13-y-o teenager and the looks of Herman Munster (only kidding ladies - I'm hot!).

Having said that, even though the place was right in the middle of student-ville, it wasn't cheap - £3 a pint, even for nasty Carling, expensive even now - so we had to work out some kind of cashback/discount scenario. We'd have gone elsewhere for our ales but it was bang across the road and the other pubs in the area were the kinds of places where the student kind would be put on a spit, cooked for 3 hours and then served up on the carvery on a Sunday.

Anyway, towards the end of my time in the halls, we discovered that the pub had bought in a whole new set of glasses for their new belgian beer range. It was here where our comeback for being fleeced beerwise was realised.

Now, I like my posh beers, and having matching glasses would be a lovely idea. Thankfully, my esteemed colleagues agreed.

With two of my geeky housemates being of a lanky, emaciated trenchcoat mafia persuasion, we had the perfect transportation for our lifted items, and using an excellent ploy of moving empties onto our table as we returned from the bog for cover, we were able to put our plan into action.

Within about a fortnight, we managed to accrue the following...

6 Hoegaarden glasses
8 Stella glasses
4 Grolsch glasses
6 Guiness glasses (one of the lads was Irish)
16 (!) pint pots
8 shot glasses
4 tumblers

and, my prize possession until returning home from my Manchester days (in the move it got smashed)...

1 Duvel glass.

In all, about 50 glasses, plus various fancy beer mats, the odd beer towel and my own personal favourite, a selection of Guiness hats swiped on St Patrick's Day... We had trouble keeping them on the pitiful shelving the halls management had the cheek to call 'storage'.

The pub clearly sussed after a while because they stopped serving beer in the lovely shiny new things, and returned to the scratched, boring pint pots.

Not satisfied with these events (and with an outlook to snatching more and selling them on) I pissed off the manager when I announced, quite loudly, that in Belgium if you don't have the glass to match the beer, you get the beer for free (for good reason too... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_glass), and that really it should be the case here... Cue the majority of the regulars on a wind up for a good few weeks, claiming the same thing, until the manager caved and got out the lovely new ones again.

So, not only we were thieves, we were bastards too. Yes, thieving bastards.
(scentless_apprentice takes two bottles into the shower!, Sat 12 Jan 2008, 20:10, 2 replies)

Since when
are Stella, Grolsch and Guinness posh beers?
(LickOutTheJamsMotherfuckers!, Mon 14 Jan 2008, 4:21, closed)

Well...
That's true, but if you look I do make a reference to belgian beers, hence the Hoegaarden and Duvel.
(scentless_apprentice takes two bottles into the shower!, Mon 14 Jan 2008, 19:00, closed)