“Fight Against Stupidity And
Bureaucracy”
You know
how I feel about thieves. I’ve made that quite clear already in a previous
post. That’s not to say that I haven’t known one or two in my time. In fact one
of my long time friends, way back from primary school days turned into a thief
in later life.
His name
was Terry. He was just a little guy, but reasonably bright. Not a star at
school by any means but he did okay, passed all his exams and went on to a good
quality high school.
That’s when
it all started to go wrong for Terry. He was fond of a good time and did his
share of parties and other social gatherings. That’s where he got introduced to
and seduced by the drug scene. Like many people his addiction started out with
smoking a little ‘pot’. A lot of
people have done that, out of curiosity mainly just to see what it is like, and
that’s as far as it goes. They do the same with cigarettes, try them, but again
never get hooked on the habit.
But Terry
wasn’t so lucky. His venture with ‘pot’
led him, as it has led many others, to experiment with stronger, and much more
addictive drugs and eventually Terry developed a habit that needed a lot of
money to support it.
That’s when
the thieving started. All petty stuff. He was not prone to violence in any way,
shape or form. It was all just opportunist crimes and most of the time he got
away with it.
On one
particular occasion, however, he was in a fairly bad way and desperately needed
a ‘fix’. He could have gone his usual
route and stolen something, or some money, but this time he thought he had a ‘better idea’, one that would
short-circuit the normal ‘steal-sell-buy’
route that got him the money he needed to buy the drugs.
The ‘better idea’ was breaking into a
pharmacy where he might find a little money, but he would definitely find some
drugs. And that’s what he did. In the early hours one Sunday morning Terry
broke into his local pharmacy. Sure enough he found what he was looking for and
he loaded up his pockets with lots of different pills.
In normal
circumstances, if he had just left it at that, he might have got away with it,
for a while anyway. But, as I said earlier, he was in a fairly bad way and
desperately needed a ‘fix’.
And that’s
just what he did. He opened a box of pills that he had lifted and gulped a few down
there and then.
You’ve
probably guessed already that the pills he took were the wrong ones. In his
haste to ‘get well’ Terry had
mistakenly opened and swallowed a load of some kind of tranquilizer.
That’s why
the police, who had been alerted by the silent alarm in the pharmacy, found
Terry fast asleep on the floor behind the counter. He didn’t waken up for
another fifteen hours! The medical report later said something like, “he had taken enough to down a thoroughbred
stallion”, and as I mentioned Terry was a smallish bloke.
Of course,
when he wakened up and was released from hospital he was duly charged with
burglary. A while later he appeared in court and was sentenced to several
months in jail. It should have bee a Godsend for him. Cut off from his
supplies, and the money to buy them, he went ‘cold turkey’ and managed to get himself off the drugs. When he was
released he was ‘clean’. It was the
opportunity he needed to restart his life, the second chance that most of us
never have.
For a while
he did well, stayed ‘clean’ and even
got himself a steady job. Now he had money in his pockets and, because every
penny wasn’t being blown on drugs, he could rent a decent apartment, buy
himself good clothes, eat well, get all the tv, radio, hi-fi, and other things
that we all surround ourselves with.
But the
story for my friend Terry hasn’t got a happy ending I’m afraid. There must be a
destructive gene in some people that makes them impossible to save. Despite the
quality of his life being so much better without his drug habit, something
happened – I don’t know what – and he started using again. Soon he was back to
his old ways. He lost all his new found possessions, all sold to raise money to
pay the drug dealers.
Eventually,
maybe eighteen months or a couple of years later Terry was found dead in his
apartment, the victim of a drug overdose.
I hadn’t
seen him for a long time before his death, but I had kept a passing interest
and heard about some of his activities from other friends who lived in his
town. I was sorry when I eventually found out his fate. It was such a waste.
Maybe a
warning to others? I hope so.
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Can’t leave
my blog like that of course. Have to end on a lighter note.
How about
this bunch of morons?
There was
the guy who went into a drug store in Baltimore, pulled a gun, announced a
robbery, and pulled a "Hefty-bag"
face mask over his head. He then realized that he'd forgotten to cut eyeholes
in the mask. He was arrested by security men.
- - - - - -
-
Or the Belgian
genius who when questioned by police about robbing a jewellery store in Liege
said he couldn't have done it because he was busy breaking into a school at the
same time.
Police then arrested him for breaking into the school. Duhhh!
- - - - - -
-
Then there
were the two men who tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a
chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling
the front panel off the machine, though, they pulled the bumper off their
truck.
Scared,
they left the scene and drove home... With the chain still attached to the
machine... With their bumper still attached to the chain... With their
vehicle's license plate still attached to the bumper. You couldn't make it up!
- - - - - -
-
On a
Seattle street a man attempted to siphon petrol from a motor home parked there.
But he got a lot more than he bargained for.
Police
arrived at the scene to find an ill man curled up next to a motor home. Quickly
following the scent of this crime, they discovered that in trying to steal
gasoline from the Motor home’s gas tank, this idiot had actually plugged his
hose into the motor home's sewage tank by mistake.
The owner
of the vehicle declined to press charges, saying that it was the best laugh
he'd ever had.
- - - - - -
-
And
finally, while Investigating a purse snatching, police detectives picked up a
man who fit the thief's description and drove him back to the scene. He was
told to exit the car and face the victim for an ID. The suspect carefully eyed
the victim, and shouted, 'Yeah, that's
the woman I robbed.'
Have
you had similar experiences? Send them along. Let the world know what is
happening before it is too late.
