» Shoplifting

Gastropod
My mates mum stole a snail from the USA. It was in a fish shop (tropical not cod or haddock) on a display tank. On the outside. This didn't ring any alarm bells.

She decide it would look great at home, in her tank. So she put it into a film case (pre-digital days of old)which she filled with water and popped in the plucky gastropod.

She then kept it all holiday, flew home ignoring all signs "do not transport wildlife".

She gets home, overjoyed that it is still alive. So she pops it in the tank.

Every morning she got up, the snail had got all the way to the top of the tank and was trying to escape. She would push it back in again and happily go about her day.

It was nearly a month later when a friend of hers was round she showed off the snail - " it keeps trying to escape to its certain doom so i just plop it back in".

The friend laughed her arse off - the snail was a common american land snail, probably from the garden or the street and had accidently wandered into the shop. It had now been shoplifed thousands of miles and was being forcibly drowned daily. Every time it managed to get out of the water it was pushed back.

i hope she ate it to save our indigenous snails. It could be the start of something massive
(Mon 14th Jan 2008, 16:21, More)

» Expensive Mistakes

Car Crushed
I saw an expensive forklift mistake. I watched a warehouseman use the wrong forklift for a job and lose his load (so to speak)

Instead of getting the correct attachement he used the 30tonne forklifts squeeze motion (brings the forks together) to grab a coil of wire. Not 100m, but somewhere in the region of about 2 miles of wire. the whole thing weighed about 7 tonnes. Usually a couple of forklifts move it aroung until the big fork can get is cable reel attachment to go through the middle of the reel and grip it, before loading up.

This time, they just grabbed it and lifted and drove off. All was well for about 30m, out of the warehouse and across the car park to the loading bay.

Now this is where it happened. Whilst he stopped to work out how to load up, the forks decided to have a little hiccup and loosened for a second (they aren't designed to work like this). The reel shifted and with this new found momentum started to roll out of the forks and towards the car park.

Things like this happen in slo-motion. 7 tonnes of copper on a massive 12 foot wooden reel rolled towards the car park and we were all powerless to stop it.

Even better, it managed to pick out the depot managers new Vauxhall Cavalier GSI2000 (white with spoilers!).
Basically it was destroyed. It was like a cartoon with a flat front end and the reel kinda wedged somewhere about where the back seat started.

The manager simply didn't believe us - he thought it was a another work floor prank to get him outside and laugh at him. 45 minutes of pleading did get him outside and his face was a picture.
All credit, he laughed. And kept laughing, almost maniacally. He got a new car on company insurance, no-one mentioned to the insurers we weren't using the right bits.

i bet he cried when he got home. i would have.
(Fri 26th Oct 2007, 12:00, More)

» Guilty Secrets

Found a Wallet
after clubbing at the Fridge in brixton (yay for hard trance) we went for a lucozade in a little shop.
On the floor was a wallet, clearly fallen out of some other poor souls pocket.

Now, we figured that this could have been the worst place to lose a wallet so pocketed it so the dodgy looking shopkeepers didn't claim it and got the first train home.

Once on the train, we looked through to a veritable treasure trove of amusement.

There was (check if my memory still works...)

3 years of Bus Travel cards with pictures of him on it.Very amusing to see it get grown to a pony tail (didn't suit him) and then cut.
Cash card, and a little slip of paper with 4 digits on it - may have been his pin.
His Driving license, with more pictures of him.
A passport application form partially completed.
And £20, and a selection of storecards and general crap.

So, thrust into this morale dilemma we formulate a plan. We spent the £20 and wrote a list of what we had bought. Frijj milkshakes, donuts, newspaper, Haribo, and more lucozade some baccy and some kingsize orange doobie makers.

We then posted all the important stuff back, to the address on the drivers license with an addtional letter, explaining how close he had come to his life getting cloned and how lucky he was! and that he should never grow his hair again.

We thought we did the right thing, but occasionally i feel we were too harsh on his hair.
(Mon 3rd Sep 2007, 13:36, More)

» Accidental innuendo

PE teacher
There is a set up here, all true, which explaings the note...

When messing about with me sister, we decided to see how many stairs we could jump down. i regularly didn't use the bottom 4 stairs on the way down and decide that 6 steps (out of 13) was pretty decent. So did it a few times until i landed with al the skill of Les Dennis on the Games. Flat footed and really badly bruised both feet. i couldn't walk without walking on the bruises.

Come PE day, there was no way i could play rugby ( called that but really was lots of cross country running in the rain ).
At last, a legit reason for a note. Mum dutifully writes one and puts in an envelope.

I hand in the note. He moans and walks off and i set about the 1 hour 20 minutes of double PE and the skiving in the warm with applomb. About half hour in he comes over to me pissing himself laughing and asking if i was lying? I said no my feet really hurt. He then probed deeper, and enquired exactly how i did such damage to myself? i explained i jumped down the stairs, and he just said "well how the f*ck did you hurt your testicles then?"

I was confused. Really confused and started to get a bit scared. I stated again i jumped down the stairs and landed heavy.

I then thought to ask to see the note. Well done mum.

" Dear Mr Davies. Barry cannot do PE today as he has jumped down the stairs and hurt his balls and heels of his feet."

Mum 1, Grammar Fairies 0
(Mon 16th Jun 2008, 14:28, More)

» Accidental animal cruelty

cat sellotape game
Needed :

1 piece of sellotape or similar
1 cat (smart or dumb - doesn't matter)

Put sellotape on top of head, sticky side to the fur. With a stopwatch see how long it takes to come off.

Take careful note of the futile "licking-your-own-elbow" type efforts.

Its not cruel. How can sellotaping cats be cruel?

Cruel was when we changed the floor from carpet to wood whilst our first kitten was having his plums chopped off. He came home, woozy, wandered in and was fine until his little legs splayed out on the shiny surface splatting his empty nutsack on the floor.
The look of pain and suprise still makes my heart sink. He didn't know why it hurt, why it happened, and possibly why it didn't hurt more. Poor little fella.
(Thu 6th Dec 2007, 12:14, More)