A Sure Sign of Dumbassery
While I was enjoying a Triple Lindy burrito with sour cream and cilantro for lunch yesterday, I started thinking about all the fun we had with signs during high school. Well, to be more precise… signs and cheap beer in unreasonable amounts.
Sounds kinda weird, huh? Well, allow me to explain.
Bill from WV and I went through a period in our drinking career, you see, when we drove around the Kanawha Valley looking for interesting street signs to pilfer. Most of the ones we snagged had some connection to music: Hendrix Avenue, 52nd Street, E Street, Costello Street, etc.
We had it down to a science. Once we identified our target the driver would pull alongside the pole, and the person in the passenger seat would jump out, climb up on the bumper, and rock the entire housing back and forth until it said fukkit. Usually we’d end up with two signs, going in opposite directions, and we’d have to dismantle the thing with a screwdriver.
During my entire stay in Greensboro I had a green Dunbar Avenue sign, obtained in this manner, hanging in my bedroom. Wonder what happened to that thing….?
After a while, though, the tiny signage didn’t do it for us anymore. It was just a gateway drug, and led to the theft of yield signs, speed limit signs, etc.
I remember one time we took an entire pole(!), with the signs still attached. After we stripped-off everything we wanted, Bill javelined the pole through the dining room window of an empty house in the neighborhood.
A year or so later, when the place was being renovated, we saw a worker carrying that thing out the front door, shaking his head in confusion. And we buckled-over in laughter.
One night we were out drinkin’ beer and stealin’ signage, and forgot one in the trunk of Bill’s parents’ car. His mother told his dad she was hearing a banging noise in the rear of the vehicle, and when he checked it out he found a Men At Work sign (or somesuch), in the trunk. The thing was massive, and Bill’s dad was not amused.
If we hadn’t committed that unfortunate tactical error, I have no doubt we would’ve soon graduated to interstate exit signs, and the like. Sure, we would’ve had to rent a flatbed truck, but that would’ve only been a minor hurdle.
We also had a brief flirtation with the moving around of election signs. We’d take Bill’s pickup around town, throw random campaign signs into the back, and set them up in the yards of our friends. Oh, we thought this was high comedy…
We heard, through my Dad, that the candidates were extremely upset, and blaming each other. We were causing a political incident! But did we stop? No, we did not. And we were eventually caught by the police.
There used to be a large vacant lot in the center of town (where Shoney’s now hosts their all-you-can-eat Gristle Bar), which was prime real estate for politicking. So one night, all cranked up on Miller High Life or whatever, we went there and started loading the bed of the truck again.
And the next thing we know… cops are all over us. Apparently they’d been watching from afar, and swooped in the moment they saw someone monkeying with the campaign materials. Bill, I remember, was running across the lot with a huge wooden sign hoisted above his head, like a hang glider.
The cops told us to sit on the curb, and shut our goddamn mouths. We’d polished off our share of beers during the evening, and started worrying we might be arrested for public drunkenness, or DUI, or something. So, to mask the smell of Miller, we each ate a handful of grass. Heh.
But they only asked a few questions, and let us go. They wanted to know if we were a couple of standard-issue dumbasses, or dumbasses-for-hire. “Are you doing this for someone else?” they demanded. And our confused expressions told them all they needed to know.
I remember they were going through the signs in Bill’s truck, and making a comment about each candidate. “Oh God, put that one back, she’ll raise nine kinds of hell…” and “Yeah, that’s just Ratman, lean it against that dumpster over there…”
Ratman?
We also went around town one evening, and collected a metric shitload of realtor signs — and put every one of them in Rocky‘s front yard. There were dozens of the things, from many different companies. I don’t know why that’s so funny, but it is. I’m laughing right now. I wish I had a picture of it.
During one of our sign-procurement expeditions, our friend Mike grabbed a flashing yellow light. It had been attached to a metal sawhorse, in front of some recent roadwork, and was larger than you might think.
Somehow we smuggled it into his bedroom; I think I passed it to him through a window. And that’s when things got really interesting…
His parents were in the living room watching TV, and we couldn’t get the flashing to stop. And that shit was bright! The bedroom door was closed, but there was an intermittent blast of yellow coming from underneath it. If his mom or dad went to the bathroom, it would be Game Over.
Mike put the ridiculous thing under the covers of his bed, but it didn’t help much. Every few seconds the whole platform would light-up. It was like some kind of weird art exhibit.
We couldn’t stop laughing: nervous laughter.
He hid it in a closet, way in the back behind the game of Life and Mousetrap, and that seemed to work best. But it still wasn’t ideal. When I walked home, a little later, the entire rear of their house was flashing yellow through the windows.
An old man was standing in his backyard, with a bag of trash in his hand, and said, “What’s going on over there?” And I just shrugged my shoulders and kept walking.
The whole thing was quite hilarious, and Mike’s parents weren’t overly pissed when he was busted minutes after my departure. I mean, it was inevitable. It’s very difficult, we learned, to conceal a freakin’ lighthouse beacon inside a suburban bedroom. It really is.
And sorry about yesterday… We sold the rolling box o’ beds, and it ended up dominating the day. We had to transfer the title, and all that crapola. Then the lights wouldn’t work when they were ready to leave. So, what should’ve required an hour, dragged out for most of the afternoon.
But hopefully this rare Friday update will make up for yesterday’s radio silence.
I probably won’t update again until Tuesday. I hope everybody has a great holiday. The weather here is perfect (perfect!), and I can foresee some meat being cooked out of doors, as well as a substantial number of beers disappearing. Yes, I can.
As for a Question… Did you ever get into the moving around of signs, or anything of the sort? Please tell me it wasn’t just us. Also, any plans for the big swollen holiday weekend? What kind of beer will you be enjoying?
See you guys next time!
Oh, and yes, you read that correctly: we ate grass.
Filed under: Daily
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My wife was hinting about what she wanted for our upcoming anniversary.
She said, ‘I want something shiny that goes from 0 to 150 in about 3
seconds.’
I bought her some bathroom scales.
And then the fight started*
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Most useful tape measure – ever.
http://halfdillo.blogspot.com/2009/04/useful-tape-measure.html
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Top tennery.
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More dumbassery and shenanigans from your friends in Bollywood:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VtDlsUIch8
Let’s make this comments section its own “Further Evidence” section!
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When we young and dumb little hooligans (read 19-21) we would all get back from college for the holidays and drive around the neighborhood about the time the inflatable Christmas decorations became popular. Nothing beat the sight of one of us running full speed and “linebacker tackling” a 7 foot tall Frosty or Santa. Never caused any damage but that was hilarious antics whenever that group of troublemakers got together.
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Top 10!!
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Tada!
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When we were kids we would go out and steal christmas lights from the hood. Of course we eventually got caught since the town was so small but we never had to stoop to eating a handful of grass. High dollar comedy Mr. Kay
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Someone here in Wilmington, Delaware thought taking a stop sign out of the corner intersection would be funny. Kids in a car got broadsided. 4 died.
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Never pilfed a street sign or what have you…but the boyfriend wants a “BUMP” sign in the worst way for our gameroom…HehHeh.
When I was a tweenager, my Dad would tell us “instead of going to the mall parking lot to watch the chrome rust do something constructive like set a bag of dog poop on fire on someone’s front porch, or stick pins in someone’s doorbell so it rings endlessly, or corn someone’s house…scars the shit out of them every time! But don’t forget to run like hell cause I’m not going to the police station.” Yeah, Dad was a real hoodlum.
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Top Ten??? Whooaaa!!!!!!!
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CRAP! bikerchick…wanna trade places? haha
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@bikerchick
Set a bag of dog poop on fire on someone’s front porch. Check
Stick pins in someone’s doorbell. Check
Corn someone’s house. WTF? Can somebody help me here.
That’s just funny.
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When at school in a small Indiana town most of the dorm rooms had a sign or two (or 14). Some from
that town and some from home towns. Everything was fine until ALL the signs at the main cross road in town
disappeared, that made the front page of the newpaper since they were right in front of a big window at the police station were the dispacher sits 24/7. The police told the school that if the signs aren’t returned they will search the campus and arrest anybody with the signs. The next day 2 pickup truck loads FULL of signs were delivered to the police, which made the paper again since the police only thought the signs in front of the station were missing. PS. My signs went under the floor mat in the trunk of my car until I took them home at the end of the quarter.
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Stole a lot of giant shiny orbs to display in my apartment. Y’know, the kind that sat on a white concrete cone in people’s yards for whatever reason, with a Christmas tree ornament ball on top. Turned out those have hooks attached to the orb, and can be hung upside on ceiling hooks, just like a Christmas tree ornament. Proceeded to smash them with a baseball bat to freak out apartment visitors, sending shattered glass everywhere. Of course, only when the guest disagreed with something. Also stole a lot of plastic Santas from lawns at Christmastime. Set them up on my front porch and beat their heads in with baseball bats. Just decapitated the plastic reindeer.
Also got a kick out of stealing the South Charleston Rax Roast Beef clock. They kept replacing it….I kept stealing it. Eventually had seven of them.
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Back in college, I shared a house with four guys that were obsessed with stealing signs. I remember street signs, fall out shelter signs, and an exit sign or two. I think there may have even been a traffic light in someone’s room that had been rigged up to work. And, we also had one of those metal sawhorses with a flashing light on top. It stoppped working after about two weeks or so– thank goodness!
When everyone eventually moved out, we were left with just one sign, which still hangs in our bathroom today: http://www.speedysigns.com/images/osha/large/DANGER25.gif
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JRP
As to the “Corn someones house” comment:
We used to call it tic tacking. You shell a bunch of feed corn from cobs taken from a farmers field. They are hard and dry like pebbles, but very light. Then you throw handfulls of them at the windows and siding of houses and it makes an unholy racket. Aluminum siding with metal awnings were the best target houses.
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We didn’t live far from the Branch Dividian compound that was set ablaze, so we constantly stole the road signs leading to it. I think it was called “Double E Ranch Rd” or something like that.
My brother and I also stole one of those yellow flashing lights. There was a very small hole on the front of the thing and you could click it off and on by sticking a straightened paper clip or something like that in there.
When my brother and I got our own place together we decorated the dining room walls with flattened out budweiser 12 packs on one wall and street signs on the other. Very classy.
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Hey, what’s with the central daylight time timestamp?
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I went through my sign, flag, and Christmas thievery stage in my freshman year in college. We weren’t into street signs because they took too much work, but we would steal signs from stores, flags from everywhere imaginable (and sometimes the whole pole…inside my tiny Toyota hatchback!), and a lot of Christmas decorations. Stole two ginormous Christmas wreaths off the doors of the hoity-toity restaurant where I waited tables part time. The owners were super pissed, and I heard them saying that those wreaths were $500 apiece! Gulp.
But, our biggest addiction was stealing stuff from hotel hallways. All of my plates, glasses, silverware, etc came from room service trays left outside of hotel rooms. We even stole the pillows off the sofa in the lobby once! Ahhhh, to be young and drunk.
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Man, we couldn’t get away with that shit today. So many surveillance cameras set up everywhere and cell phone cams and stuff. We’d have been grazing on grass a whole lot earlier in our career, if it were today.
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My brother’s friend stole the cherry off the top of the only cop car in our little town. WHILE the cop was in it talking to his friends.Every kid in town knew about it, but no adults that I’m aware. Created quite a scandal.
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Thanks for the clarity Jonboy. It’s still funny to hear “corn someone’s house”
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My brother was the sign collector. His favorite was the radioactive waste symbol he stole, but he would never say where it came from. I’m convinced that his son’s behavioral issues are payback for his crime.
My friends and I collected road kill and delivered them to the people we liked the least. The flattest, stinkiest ones were the best, though my friend didn’t like that her father’s beloved ’68 Mustang had a lingering stench to it. At some point she refused to transport any more vermin and our antics ceased. (Note: most teenage girls have little appreciation for classic cars. Never hand over your keys. I now have serious regrets about what we did in/with/to that car.)
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“corn someone’s house” sounds like a euphemism if you ask me
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That chick in the bunker cam better give up the sandwich, those monkeys ain’t playing.
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I remember having a few, including a full size stop sign, in my bedroom in my youth but have no memory of how I got them–probably best that way. Whilst cleaning my spawn’s room a couple of weeks ago I had to move a pole with the two street names still attached. I remember scratching my head and wondering how the hell he got that particular location’s sign without getting caught and then got it in the house without me seeing it. I still haven’t mentioned to him–I have a little problem with the pot calling the kettle black due to promises I made in my childhood about my own parents and their do as I say not as I do ‘tude.
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Stole the double ended arrow sign at a T road once, then drove a mile down the road a smashed a classmates mail box. Turned around a drove right through the T road. What a dumbass. We were all pretty drunk though. I think growing up in a rural area makes this more common as there is so little to do, or at least there was in the mid 80′s.
I’ll be having a couple of cans of Bud on the golf course tonight. Then a couple of pints of PBR’s after that.
Wish I could get my hands on some Yuenglings!
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I was more of a boss, I sent out my thugs to steal signs that matched the stereo equipment I had in my car and then built Alpine and Polk roadsigns into my speaker enclosure…
The money I wasted on car stereo crap. But it all got stolen and I received a huge check from the insurance company. I didn’t re-buy any of the crap. Instead I spent it on stupid home theater equipment…
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Our sign stealing was mostly those A-shaped “Caution: Wet Floor” signs you see when they mop the floor at Burger King. We tried to get as many different colors as we could. The fun ended when my friend got chewed out by the band director for putting all the stolen signs on the shelf where his tuba was supposed to go. “And I’m sure you bought all those?” Ha!
Then once we stayed at a Jellystone Park campground on a trip to King’s Island (I think). The big, 4×4 post with the logo and campsite number on it was leaning slightly to one side, so we just pushed it back and forth until it was loose enough to pull out of the ground. Then the problem became how to fit a 6′ long 4×4 in the minivan with all our stuff such that people wouldn’t notice we had stolen it. Fortunately one of the chaperones/our mischief enabler (did I mention this was church youth group trip?) figured out a way to push it under the back rows of seats and cover it with bags and so forth. That post has now been planted in a friend’s parents’ back yard for at least 15 years. Fantastic!
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My brother and I were pretty well-behaved separately, but we were kind of like a Voltron of Immature Behavior together. There was the lawn ornament phase, then the toilet paper phase, then the license-plate swapping phase, and the final insult, lighting off not one but three of those industrial-strength smoke bombs (the kind they use to check for sewer leaks) in the mall. Plus the last one in my car, when he made a bad toss out the window and it bounced off the door into his lap.
Dad was apparently a grand master when it came to that sort of stuff; we got a lot of ideas from him, but never had the balls to try most of it.
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I stole my share of road and election signs through my teens and early 20’s but nothing eventful ever happened because of it. I do recall being extremely drunk at a party one night and destroying a bunch of signs, but drunk and destruction go hand in hand and if it wasn’t the signs, it would have been something else.
We had our holiday on Monday. I wasted mine doing renovations and it turned out to be a much bigger job than anticipated (dickweed builder used aspenite sub-floors and didn’t secure them with screws, which caused me no end of problems). On the plus side I now have new ceramic in my downstairs bath and foyer. On the down side I still have subfloor in my living and dining room and the vanity and toilet need to be reinstalled in the bathroom. For the record the toilet is actually sitting in the living room awaiting its return to the bathroom.
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A group of guys from LI that I knew in high school were big on stealing signs, as I learned one weekend when I came to visit. Came back to the house where I was staying and noticed that my Jeep tailgate was down – the guys had been around & left me a metal security system sign from someone’s lawn. I loved it, and brought it home. I still remember my mom helping me pack for college – she pulled it out of the closet, gave me a quizzical look, and I just cracked up. She decided she didn’t want to know…
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We stole everything we could get our hands on and had an extensive collection of flashy lights, lawn furniture and yard tools.
We were paper boys and when someone wouldn’t pay or started that “come back tomorrow” every farking day crap…
They lost something from their yard or out-building or whatever.
I would just take whatever suited me and leave the little ticket/receipt in their mailbox.
Good times!
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I stole a Fallout Shelter sign from the employee hallway when I worked at Sears in the late 70s (wish I knew what happened to that). I also stole a High Voltage sign while climbing an electrical pole while drunk (yeah, I was a smart kid) and a One Way sign that hung on the kitchen wall of my house until my late 20s when it was replaced by a bar BASS mirror knicked from the storage room from the bar I was working at at the time. Good times…..
Happy Friday, Surfers! Have a great long weekend! I will be sipping on some Strega soon – no beer for me.
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@Ben K: “…a Voltron of Immature Behavior…” I am sooo using that, probably tonight.
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@vicki your son probably picked it up after somebody ran it over. I passed one yesterday just lying in the ditch with about 4 foot of post left on it, I contemplated turning around to retrieve it.
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There was a family that moved into our neighborhood who had a long tradition of stealing the street-name signs of the various streets they had lived on. Because of the nature of the father’s business, they had been moving pretty frequently, and a had a large number of street signs from at least two states adorning the walls in their basment/rec room. For some reason, this absolutely horrified my parents, and my mother didn’t like me playing with the family’s kids. “They’re common theives!”
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I’ll be consuming Leinenkugle and Sam’s summer while the DSO will be consumer Fuller’s London Pride ($56/case)
I always wanted a sign in Ridley Park that had my name on it but none of my son’s Baby sitters dated miscreants so I was denied.
Stole a flashing yellow saw horse for someone in college very similar to Jeff’s recollection – almost impossible to shut off
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Who hasn’t stolen signs or barricades or fire trucks or newborns from the hospital. Hilarious update today!
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We couldn’t stop laughing: nervous laughter. <–my new signature line.
i’ve learned that stealing STOP signs is no good for anyone.
as per my pro-b, i will be drinking water this weekend.
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The dead end sign had previously taken it’s own life. (was lying on the ground). My roomate decided we needed this (alcohol was a factor for both). It was our coffeetable for a week. I felt too guilty and after 3 days took it back.
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oh, Did We Ever. With us, it was connected to the school’s marching band. Once we placed 78 real-estate signs in our band director’s yard – 12 of which were from the same realtor. She started chaining her signs to things. One time we drove two hours to get a sign bearing the name of a rival school’s town. I still have that one in my garage. Good, good times.
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One of my best friends in high school found the “Slow Children at Play” signs to be hilarious. So her hooligan with a heart of gold boyfriend stole one for her in a grand romantic gesture. Awwww.
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dumbassery is decriptive and works on so many levels! My wife recently started using the phrase: douchebagerry it also works on so many levels: whenever she is being bored to death with information on some individual she does not care about: AKA: drunken boyfriend, evil mother in law,bitchy best friend etc etc! she now responds: “well that sounds like an awful lot of douchbaggery to me” Feel free to use it in your novel Jeff, all I ask is a signed first edition!!!
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We broke into the city garage when i was 16 and loaded up a pickup truck with every sign, flashing light, barrier and barrel we could fit.
Then we drove around town setting them up in people’s yards, in front of schools and even on the town hall front yard. We made the paper that week, but no one ever got caught. It was all about being able to keep your mouth shut.
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My two cousin’s and I started on an adventure from Atlanta to buy firecrackers across the border into Alabama. Instead of using the interstate, we decided it safer to go the back roads. After crossing over the state line we stopped for milkshakes. As I remember, my cousin got the wrong flavor shake and instead of just drinking it he decided on a little target practice with a speed limit sign on the outskirts of Speedtrap, Alabama. When he threw the large Strawberry shake, he centered the sign and in the process his class ring came flying off his finger. We pulled over just passed the sign and were out scouring the ground in search of something that would eventually sit in a dresser drawer for his lifetime. That’s when Barney Fife pulls up behind us with lights flashing on the patrol car. We all thought we were going to jail. My cousin told him he was holding his hand out the window and the ring just came off. All I can remember is staring at the back of that sign with the pink gooey mess dripping from the bottom of it onto the ground. It’s funny the things you remember from your childhood.
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When my big sister was in high school in 1985, her and her friends used “borrow” plastic pink flamingos from peoples yard and bring them home. At any one time, you could find at least a couple in her trunk. Since I was in upper elementary school, I thought this was the funniest thing EVER. My folks didn’t get too upset. They took more of a “those crazy young kids” approach…
However, I think that if my baby sister, who was born in 1990, had ever done something like that, it would have been a topic of discussion at the family meetings every week.
God, it was great being a kid in the mid-80′s.
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I never stole any signs. But I did grow up in southern Indiana. We corned alot of houses. It does sound like a funny term now. Corned.
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Once stole the “Pizza Pizza” cardboard guy from Little Cesears Pizza..needless to say it was life size and pretty obvious pressed up against the back window of a camaro.
good, drunken times.
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Hat’s off to all Memorials out there.
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I ended up with a stop sign….the details aren’t clear nor what my parents did with it..(can you recycle them at the township??)…I think not and will never ask!
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That’s great, but we weren’t nearly that ambitious, we’d see a sign we wanted, “slide” off the road and run it over doing 15 or 20 mph. It worked good because we had a shit-ass Riviera that looked like a crumpled potato chip bag. We actually riveted a no parking sign to the hood where a hole had formed from “hood side competitions”. Later on we got into modifying signs after we got too lazy to steal them. We would make funny looking hats, canes, and tailed coats for the pedestrians in the pedestrian crossing sign. The town lost it after we modified a deer crossing sign so the deer’s “member” could plainly be see whizzing. There are still deer crossing signs in WV with the deer being ridden by Burning Man.
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As bored teenagers we would drive around town getting high almost every Friday and Saturday night, and we’d look for those signs that had the removeable letters on them. We’d spot one of them and then write down the phrase, then drive around and figure out how we could rearrange those letters into something disgusting and juevenile. One of the best ones was reworked by a couple of my friends – The Elk River Holiday Inn’s sign read “cheap sluts room 50′ for almost an entire day until someone alerted the staff and they changed it…
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Hmm.. the best dumbass thievery I can come up with was this one time in college when “a group of us” decided it would be a good idea to liberate a computer terminal from a lab (gives you an idea of the time frame). My buddy was a world-class champion bullshitter – so when campus security arrived, the officers ended up HOLDING THE DOOR FOR US while we carried the thing out. Good times.
ND: Stone IPA
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Dumbassery at work!: Last week I purchased a wireless router from linksys get the old home computer & laptop working together! Followed the instructions: didn’t work! called customer service & despite some communication problems with the guy in India got it working! next day internet connection not working ,back to India customer service girl gets angry because I am having difficulty understanding her! she hangs up! Try again, very helpful person, we work through the problems for 90mins & then I am told to hand over my credit card number for $9.99 before they will fix that which they sold me which does not work! Hmmmm! called the customer service line in the States & immediately reffered back to India! asked where I was calling (politely) told it was policy not to tell me where I was calling (WTF) O.K. dropped the dime, called Cisco in California & asked for the name & address of the head of customer service to explain my frustration: :we are not allowed to give out that information” Now I get it! obviously Cisco systems, when not exporting jobs offshore, has confused itself with the CIA! At least they are honest enough to say screw you America our products don’t work & you are going to have to pay for us to fix them anyway! If dumbassery was an Olympic Sport they get the gold!!!
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It’s too late now, but many years ago I discovered that there’s a little hole in the back (or bottom, I forget which) of the flashing yellow lights that enable a crafty vandal to turn them on or off with a nail or sturdy paper clip. On another note, we (the Veg Team) used to take the cement fire rings that were placed along the beach on Mission Bay in San Diego, and tip them on their sides and roll them into the water. Despite the fact that they weighed a whole group of pounds, they only rolled far enough to land on their sides, and vanish an inch or so under the water. As far as I know, we were the only ones to do this. 30 years later, I can say that we are responsible for the now square fire rings on Mission Bay. A proud vandal legacy was born.
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Back in the 70′s there was a sign with movable letters located in that vacant lot in Dunbar that Jeff described as where Shoney’s is now. The sign would usually be for Art’s Flower Shop, a Dunbar establishment.
Someone would frequently change the letters around to read “Fart’s Lower Shop.” Could that person had been Jeff?
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I worked at Arby’s in high school and there was a manager we all hated. One night my buddy Chris and I were out road drinking and decided to get every political sign we could find and put it in this guys front yard. We ended up putting 138 signs in asshole’s yard. He was bitching about it for days. I know the number because he counted and announced it at work. He knew it was one of us that did it and vowed he would find out who it was. Chris and I couldn’t take credit for risk of being fired. Then one Saturday durring a busy lunch rush this dickhead walks out and we never hear from him again. He left a note in the office with his keys saying he quit. The general manager said he thouhgt it had to do with the sign prank. Chris being a fame whore couldn’t hold it in any longer and let everyone know it was he and I who pulled the prank. Everyone including the other managers were thankful that we did it. I heard he joined the Navy and is still in now 15 years later.
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A great tradition at my high school in Ol’ Kaintuck was senior prank day. It was a simple concept: every senior class was responsible for a prank on the entire school as we neared graduation.
For an entire year, my class collected every plastic pink flamingo yard art that we could find. They were stored at three locations so that if one got busted, the whole project wasn’t a loss. Fortunately, we never got busted.
Every damn pink flaminger (as grandpa would say) was purloined within a three county radius of my high school. We even crossed the mighty Ohio River into Cincinnati and its various redneck suburbs in search of the rare birds. Yes, rare. Our antics caused quite a stir in the local media after one homeowner complained that their prized plastic pals had been stolen three times.
In the wee hours of one morning, we set up them flamingers on the front lawn of Dixie Heights High School. About 2,000 of them by our reckoning. It was a sight both beautiful and terrifying. Best senior class prank ever in my opinion.
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Ohyes, we had quite the bit of fun with signage. Some friends and I once stole two duck-crossing signs located on a pretty sharp curve near Oxford Valley Mall. We didn’t go for the take the pole down and figure the rest out on the ground, oh no. Myself and the other girl made a cheerleader-learned hand-basket, and hoisted the one male friend we’d conned into helping us up to unscrew the sign. If one of us noticed headlights we’d yell, and he’d jump down to the ground. After a couple cars stopped and asked if we needed help (we were on the side of a random road with our hazard lights on… geniuses we are not), I came up with a pretty bright idea. We’d gotten milkshakes from a take-out place earlier in the evening, and I advised the male friend to take a swig each time we saw a car headed our way, and to pretend to be vomitting if the car slowed down to see if we needed help. Worked like a charm! Cars would slow, and once they saw the creamy upchuck, accelerate like nobody’s business.
My friend and I still have the signs, years later. In retrospect, I hope we didn’t cause any duck deaths. If I had thought of that then I probably wouldn’t have agreed to the heist.
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Related: A Sign of the (Mad) Times
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Not unless you count the cow crossing sign (yellow with a picture of a cow on it and shot with four or five bullets) that my roommate Angi and I had on our living room wall.
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My largest heist was a 3ft x 4ft metal “road closed”…not quite highway material but man that thing took up a half a wall in a small room.
My dumbest attmpted heist was a life size jeff gordon cardboard cutout from a one room bar. In the process of folding it in quarters and attmepting to stuff it down the front of my jacket, I was kindly escorted off the premises by one of the staff.
My Goal: in the middle of bumblefuck south jersey on a deserted road, there’s a random picnic table on the side of the road(must be the only manmade thing within 5 miles). Next to the table, metal signage reading “roadside table”.
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Never stole one, but I always wanted a photo of the Dead End sign in front of the funeral home in Cedar Grove, WV. Makes me LOL even now after all these years.
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I dont know what the connection between HS band and stealing signs is but one time we were having summer practice, during lunch about 10 of us went to the local Mickey-D’s. While they were waiting on us hooligans, we ( yes we) managed to remove and roll up one of their 3X10 banners that they hang infront of the counter advertising whatever crap they were stuffing into the happy meals at that time. We also managed to get a taco bell table complete with swivel chairs. (the restaurant was being redone at the time no we didnt pull it up and then sneak out of the restaurant with it. but still a pretty good haul none the less!)
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