Well, to balance it out, I will admit that in college, I would steal approximately $2.27 from the register every few days. I would do this by voiding out a transaction for a certain ice cream combination that we sold often. I did this solely so that I could afford to buy milk and bread on the way home from work. I was a very poor college student.
Oh, this is good. One night, I was working at the same ice cream store in college. It was literally just around the corner from my apartment, on the same block. There was a shortcut through parking lots in the middle of the block, it took me all of a minute and a half to walk to work.
Anyway, it was the first really warm spring night, and we'd had lines out the door all night long. We had to clear out the excess cash because another location had been held up at knifepoint. Periodically I had to take cash out of the register and put it away in a file cabinet. But we were so busy that I didn't have time to get the keys and unlock the file cabinet. So I cleared all the excess cash out of the register and walked back into the tiny kitchen/dish area, then stuffed it down the front of my pants and got back to work. Somehow, this was the most logical thing to do at the time.
Much, much later that night, after sweeping and mopping, taking ice cream machines apart and cleaning them and putting them back together, I went home, wearily. I was getting ready for bed and took off my shorts. Big wads of cash fell out. I panicked, thinking of poor Mr. Hurstwood in Sister Carrie, and quickly got dressed, stuffed the cash back in my shorts, ran back to work, unlocked the doors, and put the cash in its rightful place. The owner sometimes came by very late at night so the money wouldn't be in store overnight, and it turned out I missed him by minutes. Hurstwood, indeed.
I'm thinking now about how hard I worked back then. I always had shit jobs, and busted my ass mopping and waitressing and all that, and I have nothing to show for it now.