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.
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.
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.
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 work in IT, I have a tendency to “decommission’ hardware so it can be “recycled”
Through this method I have several enterprise switches, a home server, several very nice laptops.
I worked for a company that got bought out, but the field office had some uncounted inventory. By the time the buyers got to it, the inventory matches their spreadsheet exactly.
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.
I work for a small IT company. PCs that are discarded by our customers are securely erased and removed from our documentation before they are sent away for disposal.
We don’t track how many PCs actually make it to disposal and we already have more than enough in the workshop for testing and emergencies.
So I sometimes take one for my homelab or to donate it to a non-profit I’m involved with. All it does to the company is save them money on disposal.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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