» I Drank Meths (pointless teenage things you did to shock)

One boring evening
me and my little friends (can't remember how old we were, I think probably about 14) decided to see if we could freak out passing motorists by a few of us standing round and pretending to give one of our mates a kicking when he was on the floor.

It kind of backfired when the second car to go passed was a police car. Queue us spending half an our explaining to a couple of very unamused looking coppers that it was all just a joke and we weren't really trying to hurt him.

The moral of the story is "Don't live in Northwich" because it is so boring that this is what you will have to do for fun.
(Thu 19th Jul 2007, 16:42, More)

» Sticking it to The Man

Leeds council are largely twunts
The road that runs next to my flat was re-tarmaced a little while ago and on a section of the road about three cars long the yellow line was obscured by the new tarmac meaning that you were allowed to park there (at least I think that's what it means, surely you can't be done for parking on a single yellow if you aren't actually parked on a single yellow?)

After a while my friend who lives in the same building as me started parking there because we live pretty close to Leeds city centre which means that there's very few free parking spaces for our building and parking at the NCP car park across the road costs more than 200 quid a quarter.

She parked there for ages with no problem until one day she and everyone else parked on the unmarked bit of the road got a ticket saying they were parked on a yellow line. Obviously she wasn't so she wrote to the council saying so, but what was weird was why the traffic wardens had suddenly decided to start ticketing people for parking on a yellow line when they weren't.

We found the answer the next morning, almost every car that had been ticketed had moved and the council had taken the opportunity to try and re-draw the yellow line. The buggers had illegally ticketed people just so they could put their yellow line back again!

Now I'm not saying the council were wrong to try to re-draw their line, just that illegally ticketing people with no warning in order to do so is completely the wrong way to go about it. Fortunately my friend is a trainee barrister and went mental at the council until they agreed to retract her ticket. I'm trying to get her to keep her car parked in the single unlined car space remaining just to inconvenience the council if they try to finish their line, her letter rescinding her ticket is proof that they are wrong to try to ticket anyone parking there!

/dull council based rant
(Mon 21st Jun 2010, 17:05, More)

» Get Rich Quick

Pooflake's story just reminded me
of something I did as a poor student. I and one of my friends found that some fruit machines had cheats built in to them. You would give it some money and play it in a particular way, say refusing to take the features it offered you, holding down a particular sequence of buttons, or something like that. The idea was that the machine would then pay out the jackpot and that the jackpot would repeat until the machine was empty.

Now, we found one of these cheats on an message board somewhere on the tinterweb, it was for a particular type of gambling machine, I can't remember what the machine was called, it was somehow pie themed though if I remember right. Through careful scouting we found that there was only one pub in the vicinity which had this type of machine.

We went into the pub one afternoon, pockets jingling with pound coins, and started to do what the internet promised would pay out big time. At the start I was a bit dubious, I very strongly believed that it was complete rubbish, but I was willing to pay a tenner or so just to find out if it worked. It did! Everything went just as the internet had told us it would, everything except for the big manager bloke standing behind us as we played. We thought he was just another punter in the pub, until right at the end, when we were just about to collect our money (about £200 I think) from the machine, he put a hand on each of our shoulders and asked what the f*ck we thought we were doing in his pub, messing with his machine.

He told us to bugger off, we obliged, with thoughts that he might beat the hell out of us, or report us to the cops (to this day I have no idea how legal what we were doing was.) So we fled, leaving the manager to, no doubt, take all the money we had accrued in the machine for himself.

Apparently I'm too stupid to be a good criminal, weird really as I'm currently back at uni doing my PhD.

Oh, by the way, if your reading this, and you own a pub in Newcastle under Lyme, which used to have a pie based fruit machine in it, a few years ago (about 6 I think), I’m sorry I tried to steal from you, it was more the spirit of scientific enquiry than the theft which motivated me!
(Mon 4th Aug 2008, 13:52, More)

» Faking it

I once faked...
pretending that I hadn't noticed that the QOTW had changed, so I could post the tale of ghostlyness that just happened to me.

I'm a PhD student at leeds uni, and the university discounts my rent by a couple of grand a year for being a sub-warden, essentially I hang around during the semester and help the students out with their studenty problems (it's more twunts who lock themselves out of their room than anything interesting but meh.)

Now that the students have gone I have moved myself from my little flat on site into a great big old house (also part of the site) which the students have moved out of. It’s a nice old building which usually houses 16 students, so it’s pretty spacious for me on my own.

Just A few minutes ago I started to hear a gurgling noise coming from behind me as I was sitting at my computer watching downloaded House episodes. So I turned round and I saw a dark figure standing behind me looking down at me, my brain, not working properly, assumed it was one of my friends playing a joke or something so turned round further to tell them to grab a seat. Then I realised, I was not only alone in my room, I was the only person in the building, I had locked the whole place up earlier when I finished washing up. Then I noticed that their proportions were all weird, somehow wrong.

I shouted, I can't remember what, doubt it would have been something my nan would have a proved of, and spun round in my chair to address the grim specter. As I spun round I started laughing, turns out it was made of a combination of my jacket over the back of my sofa, and my new glasses with a much thicker arm bit than my old ones. Nearly gave me a heart attack.

The gurgling was a tap left on from when I washed an apple a few minutes ago.

Apologies for length, and for lack of cuddling afterwards, I'd had a shock...
(Fri 11th Jul 2008, 1:14, More)