Have you ever taken something home from a workplace without permission, to keep it?

No. Edit: Wait, COVID. I took COVID home.

Nothing big but I'm the one in the office who decides what gets thrown away. It's amazing what I find dumpster diving immediately after I've cleaned an area.

Someone's trash is someone's treasure!

Hahaha fuck yeah!

Microwave, lounge, fridge, dozen office chairs and a shit load of stationary.

Legend
- Office was closing down and the local boss said anything not on the asset register was fair game!

So much shit. I work in restaurants so I take food all the time. My food budget is tiny.

Back when I was much more brazen, all my plates, cups, pots, pans and cleaning supplies were from work.

The rate at which I steal from work is directly proportional to my pay rate.

The rate at which I steal from work is directly proportional to my pay rate.

So the more you get paid, the more you steal? (sorry, had to 😛 it's quite obvious what you mean of course)
- *Inversely proportional
  
  As you can tell by my career choice, I didn't get the best education :)

Oh this happened to me in reverse. My workplace (a client's office, technically) dumped a bunch of stuff at my house without permission, and I did not keep it. Expected me to store boxes and boxes of financial records, for infinity years, no contract or anything. They also defaulted on money owed to me, which I had to pay taxes on, even though I received nothing. Never have I met such an arrogantly entitled company owner.

Sold it all as scrap paper. Recovered 0.005% of the money owed this way. Later their company was dissolved due to nonpayment of taxes. If they ever come back to the country, they may have heir passport withheld until they pay what's owed. Which is whatever the tax department says it is, because they have no financial records.

Hmm. But can you get in trouble for destroying this financial record stuff?
- The company which is responsible for their own financial records can get in trouble. And he could get in trouble if he destroyed them at their office. But if they dumped them at his house without a contract then he is free to dispose of them from his property.
- No. He's responsible for caring for those, not me. If I dump my tax records on your front lawn, that's on me -- you can just leave them there in the rain or wait for the city to pick them up. If there was some form of contract in place I would be more careful, of course.
  
  (FYI my current home is 18 square meters. There is no front lawn. Storing them would be impossible even if I wanted to)
Now, if I was trying to destroy financial records, I could think of worse ways than for them to "accidentally" be shipped to an employee and "lost." Even better if the employee actually destroys them for me.

It kind of sounds like the sort of antics a company about to go under and unable to pay debtors/taxes might do...
- Doesn't work that way here. The tax department already has a copy of all these records. The company just lost their copy. So now that tax department can claim anything they want :)
  
  Also I was not an employee. If I was, then I might have some obligation to do something. However these were former clients who simply didn't pay their bills (so... not even clients). So no contractual agreement existed between them and me -- for a contract to be valid, it has to include due consideration (e.g. a payment received in return for some service). Since I was never paid, no valid contract existed.

If you're not stealing from work, work is stealing from you

Honestly, even if you are.

I always kept copies of my design/work even if my contract states that they belong to the company.

I do too. I wouldn’t use them for anything else, but it’s nice to have them to look at as an accomplishment, right? :)

At this one office I worked at, none of their ergonomic equipment was asset-tagged for some reason, and everybody knew about it. So whenever somebody with a lot of ergo gear got fired or quit, it was a race to raid their desk and plunder their equipment. Management never looked into it because nothing was tagged, so they never qualified what equipment was given out in order to claim as missing in the first place.

I got a decent keyboard and trackball mouse out of it. I know a few people that managed to sneak out some of the $800+ chairs, but that always felt too risky to me.

At another place I worked at, they were upgrading all their computers at every desk. I asked the dude swapping then out what they do with the old machines. He told me they were literally being taken out back to a pile to be scrapped/recycled. I asked if I could take one, he said he wasn't allowed to give them to me, but he then reiterated exactly where the pile of old computers was. I took the hint, snuck around the back of the building and grabbed one of the tiny little OptiPlex Minis. Used it as a media center for a little while.

At my previous job, once a year they had a catalog of company merch. Nobody ever got it, because it was kind of over priced. Well, I had a good year and wanted a jacket and a zip up fleece. It was like, $160. My order comes, and I love it. I give the person in charge of said orders a check. Next day, she gives it back, saying they were having an issue cashing it internationally, or something. Because the company is headquartered in Canada. So, a week goes by and I ask if it was sorted out, or should I pay a different way. She said she'd let me know. Then, she quit. I was there another year, and nobody ever hunted me down for my $160. Then I quit. Free jacket and fleece.

I do have a small collection of parts that were manufactured or ordered incorrectly. They're useless, and too small to be of any scrap value. I like them because they are so drastically different from the prints, it's funny. Like, what were they thinking when they made these? I'll probably bring them back ans toss them in the scrap bin before I leave this job.

I'm glad you got it for free because $160 is such a wild price for a company zip up fleece.
- It was! I have hundreds of dollars in company apparel that my current company just gave us. Polos, fleeces, a Carhartt coat, a Weatherproof jacket, a 50 qt Coleman cooler. We'd get something every Christmas. So, paying for your own company merch seemed weird to me, but I still wanted some. I'm glad it worked out.
I was there another year, and nobody ever hunted me down for my $160.

Interesting to hear a different story - a story that doesn't immediately hunt you down for money you owe ⭐

Old computer equipment. It wasn't being used for anything, and would have ended up being thrown out if I didn't take it. Stuff was too old to be useful in a business environment now, but I built a small retro gaming rig running Windows 98 out of it.

Way back in '99 I was a student worker for the IT group at uni. We were decommissioning about 350 486 machines. Once the drives were cleared they were taken off the books and we were told to take them to the dumpster.

Very few made the dumpster. I ended up with about 14 of them. I did a whole lotta of network projects, setup routers on them, and even had a pile as a coffee table for a bit.

They ran like champs for a long time, but eventually didn't make the long move to another house in about 2005.

Nice try, boss.

Working for a tech company, working from home is allowed. Each employee receive a monitor, mouse, keyboard,… to be able to work from home. During Covid, my wife who is working for a social organisation, had to work from home, on a super small pc without any equipment provided. One day, I went to my office, took a screen and went back home with it. We still have it now. #wishRobinHood

I also took a bowl to put water for my cat.

Yeah, as a teacher I took notebooks and pens n stuff. Ok the other hand, I had to do a lot of that work on my spare time to prepare for lectures and communication with pupils. I also bought stuff for the pupils to make the lectures more interesting as the school has a very strict budget

I get a feeling that it is to be expected that you use tools your workplace has, to, well, do your job 😁

And since you also spend your own resources for the greater good...I fail to even understand that how your input would be considered as stealing 😂 More like the contrary!

Have you ever stolen from work? Yeah, doesn’t have the same ring to it…🤦🏻‍♂️

Most employers are underpaying anyways so who am I to judge ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people are just making ends meet
I wanted to go out with a bit more neutral wording =)

About 3000 years ago I worked as a night security guard in a place where we'd often have celebrities during the day. One night during one of my rounds I found an iPod in the parking lot. Went back to the control room and started going through the menus to see if I could figure out who it belonged to, and based on the device's name I realized it belonged to an abject asshole of a media personality / early "influencer" of sorts, who got rich by "preaching" what amounted to a secular prosperity gospel, essentially a cheerleader for the "fuck you, I got mine"-brand of capitalism.

I can say I didn't have to think too many milliseconds about what to do with the device and felt no pangs of guilt about yoinking it. I used it for years and years, and probably much longer than that particular dude would have since I mainly worked low income jobs and I couldn't have afforded a new one even if I wanted to.

I reset the device but kept its name as it was, just as a sort of small personal 🖕 to that guy.

I'm amazed how many people are thieves. I don't mean that in a judgemental way. It's just so different to how I love my life. I'm somewhat taken aback by the comments about what people have stolen.

There are many reasons and starting points in these stories.

My favorite stealing stories are the ones that include items that would go to trash anyway/otherwise. I dislike the idea of stuff going to trash that needed materials and services to be created (no doubt creating some pollution while a it)...it'd just be such a waste.
Those situations feel more legitimate/reasonable to take something while passing.
It's kind of cultural. See some gloves from work at a coworker's house? Meh. Coworker wraps their body with welding cables and smuggles it out? High fives all around.

I pass my own printer's cartridge to my company for recharging. I don't print a lot tho and it's near completely work-related. I thinks it's a tax on them using signed paper documents in 2023.

My old workplace had a cafeteria where we ate as much as we wanted for a fixed price taken from our paycheck, the only thing was that we weren't allowed to take food to bring it home... So I've technically stolen a whole lot of muffins over 12 years!

So I no longer work there but I worked 10+ years as Ops manager in international removals. Once a year we would do a stocktake on all the inbound freight locations, pull aside anything that was out of place and then try and find an owner, most of the items were returned to their owners. But every year there would also be a few items without any identification, I would set these aside myself in the warehouse and then the following year if still unclaimed I would take them home or throw it in the bin.

The best items are 3 x 1.5L bottles of Penfolds Grange & 50g bar of gold.

But other than that there are so many items, a limited edition Beatles Sargent Pepper's marble pressing with all the inserts intact. Few antique gold mirrors. Artwork. Media centre PC. Dining table and chairs. 2 Herman Miller office chairs, that's just the stuff I remember while looking around my house now

Ooh real gold?

I have it in my bucket list to own a small gold nugget!
- Yeah real gold. I sold it for around $3200 at the time, I did have a look after I commented and it's worth just shy of $5100 today.. probably should have held onto it
  
  Edit: AUD that is

Honestly, no, I don't think so. I've taken things home to keep, with permission (limited design beer glasses, mostly, some old uniforms once the design changes); and I've taken home disposable supplies without permission (steel scrubs, sharpies, expo markers); and I've taken things that would otherwise be thrown out to give as gifts (best one was a six-inch Le Creuset enameled cast iron Dutch oven).

But if a job treats me right I don't steal, and if they don't I either force them to or leave.

My first experience with stealing something without permission was a family member bringing home the keys to their workplace by mistake, putting the clothes whose pocket they were inside in the washer, and then me being hit with anxiety at school because the keys travelled into my uniform skirt pocket while in the washer which made me think I stole them because someone noticed. ~~It ignited my lifetime career as master thief~~ no just kidding my sister came to the rescue. But I would never be immune to the same habit of accidental key-taking when I got older.

Accidents happen!
- Primary school me didn't know that, I had to be cheered up in the bathroom.

I had a warehouse job for a textile company that made mostly work clothes, chef coats, table linens, etc, and part of my duties was processing returns. Once in a while we got stuff back that couldn't be put back into stock for one reason or another (items had been altered, discontinued, slightly damaged) so I took home some chef coats, aprons, cloth napkins and such that otherwise were going in the trash.

I also was in charge of ordering our supplies from uline. If you've never ordered from uline (not that I recommend it, last time I checked their owners' politics were trash) when you hit certain order amounts you can get free stuff. The previous guy in charge of ordering was a manager or supervisor or something, and would give those freebies out to people, when he left they didn't really hire a direct replacement and most of his duties fell on me without any real promotion or raise so I started keeping those freebies for myself. There was never any official policy about it, and I just never really mentioned it to anyone and did it on my own since I was the guy receiving the packages anyway. Just before I gave my two weeks notice one of the other warehouse employees asked me about giving out the free stuff like the previous guy did, I wasn't there long enough to make another order after that, but if I had been she always kind of treated me like trash so I might have started giving stuff out to everyone but her.

I also probably walked out of there with a few box cutters and pencils and such, not intentionally, just putting things in my pocket and forgetting about them until I got home.

A brand new Keurig

I and the one other guy remaining at our old office for 6mo while we finished the move and got ready for demo didn't drink coffee, but HR made sure we had a brand new machine. At the end of the 6 months I took it for my wife. That was 5 or 6 years ago now and it's still the quick coffee machine when I don't wanna bother making espresso

Other than that mostly office supply doodads for random shit, like a handful of paperclips to turn into bowl plugs, or printing a shipping label on works nice sticker labels. You know, office perks

I hear you.

My boss looked me in a funny way and said "Sure, go ahead!" when I asked permission to take 1-2 pens back home.
I know it might be silly but I just felt that I wanted to ask, to have a clean conscience.

When I worked at KFC I stole an entire bag of country gravy mix. That shit lasted me years.

I also stole an entire box of frozen strawberries when I worked at Jamba Juice. Ended up giving a lot of them away.

And toilet paper when I worked at Blockbuster.

I feel like the gravy mix isn't supposed to be safe to eat that long. Might explain why you stole the toilet paper.
- If its the mix then its prolly powder.

I took a big box of cat-5 from when my office was being shut down. I made ethernet cables of varying lengths as I needed them.

Eventually they called me back and hired me as management in a new area and I worked there for 7 more years. No regrets. Would steal again.

I'm a field tech, once I was installing a line at a customer not far from home, my company supplied a box with 300m of CAT6 cable to wire everything up but the customer insisted that we use their own, armored cable. For my company it was part of the supply, already billed. I drove there so I could carry whatever I wanted. That box of cable is now in my garage.

The older and more disillusioned I grow, the more I do it.

Nothing expensive tho.

For a while my network switches were pilfered from the tech recycle bin at work. And oh so many laptop power cables (the Surface ones) so now I have one at every seat in my house.

Not so much stolen, but I was... unofficially gifted...a high performance SSD that had been sitting unused at the office for a few years. No one claimed it so I was told to take it.

And then the usual stack of notebooks, reams of paper, pens, and pencils from the office supply.

My home first aid kit is pretty well stocked too, totally unrelated to the individually packaged piles of pills at work of course.

Used to work in a painting hangar and guys would regularly pilfer supplies. For most people it was just touch up brushes or minijet cups for minor stuff at home, but some people would be stealing whole rolls of masking tape, suits and hoods, sandpaper, bottles of rubbing alcohol and acetone, etc.

I know at least one guy who confided in me that he made a mint stealing supplies and painting cars on the side. He said the only thing he paid for was paint. I think the only reason nobody ever got called out on it was because our work was so good we were a preferred painter for UAE and Qatar planes, so everyone in the C-Suite was making millions of dollars and paying jack shit to the workers, and I'm guessing they figured the shrinkage was an acceptable cost of doing business.

2 couches. Still have one of em

So many bolts...

I have spent a lot of my life scavenging old tech others have lost the use for. A couple months ago I picked up a projector I can hook up to a laptop to watch movies. That's the biggest/nicest I've taken from work.

just a bunch of floppy disks and recordable CDs.

I also wanted to take home a 386 PC that was rotting in the closet, but I missed that, tho that machine was massive.

edit: this was recently

Many times over the years. Just yesterday I stole a brand new cordless mouse, because I was using a cheap shitty chinese one at home.

Sharpies.

Loads pf unwanted forgotten tech

An ADSL modem after work upgraded to fibre, I think that's about it. They probably would've given it if I asked anyway.