Big or small, cheap or expensive.
Did you find any specific use for the item?
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.
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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)
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That’s how you become rich!!
*Inversely proportional
As you can tell by my career choice, I didn’t get the best education :)
If you’re not stealing from work, work is stealing from you
Honestly, even if you are.
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.
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.
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)
18 square meters eh.
I live in Vietnam, this is not unusual. Some of my neighbors have smaller comes. One is about 8 square meters.
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.
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.
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My brother in law is in a similar role and we often barter for PCs/parts. I’ll work on his car for him and he’ll give me an Optiplex micro or a GPU for the trouble. It’s great
Same for me… After getting a new laptop we were supposed do deliver the old one to a recycling centre.
My first work laptop from that job served as my home server up until last month or so (about 8 years). My second laptop I kept after quitting the job. I was also supposed to deliver it to a recycling point. I quit that job about 4-5 years ago. I’m writing this reply from that 2nd laptop right now :)
Seems like a better use of resources than having it scrapped. I don’t really consider it stealing, but I do get it’s probably not 100% legal either.Both laptops are Lenovo’s.
I was given a pair of HP ProLiant G6 rack servers for free from an IT director I had connections with when he was doing a routine hardware upgrade. Probably saved him some bucks on e-waste disposal costs. I kept one for myself and I gave the other to a like-minded friend.
I had no experience with homelabbing at the time. Was hoping this would be my foot in the door. Unfortunately that was the day I learned that enterprise rack servers from the pre-2010s sound like vacuum cleaners when they run. (They probably still do, I imagine, just maybe to a slightly lesser extent. I’m told enterprise hardware these days isn’t so much pursuing incremental leaps in speed and power as much as it is pursuing energy efficiency and noise.) Because of all that noise, I ended up not using it, as I have nowhere I can stick it so it can scream and not bother anyone. Ah well. It was a fun experiment nonetheless and cost me nothing.
I set it up in a LACK rack, which I still have. These days it’s just a slightly ugly, deceptively heavy coffee table in my living room. Might as well just toss it out at this point.
While cleaning up the maintenance office I found a old Sony portable Bluetooth speaker in a plastic bag. It was obviously forgotten about from the ridiculous amount of dust on it and years of crap burried over it. I was surprised when it turned on and worked with really nice sound. A little roughed up and an old model but hey a nice speaker is a nice speaker. I quit months ago and still use that speaker every day.
In case you are wondering no I do not loose any sleep over ‘stealing’ it. As far as I’m concerned it was a small bonus.
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…🤦🏻♂️
I wanted to go out with a bit more neutral wording =)
Most employers are underpaying anyways so who am I to judge ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people are just making ends meet
