Bad Kids

These first two items pretty much saved my life for a few years back in the day. One’s a broken heavy-duty magnet and the other is a dollar bill with some tape on the very tip to stretch it out an extra foot. If you can’t figure it out by now, you probably aren’t criminally inclined.

The altered dollar doesn’t really work on the new fandangled vending machines, but on the old ones you can get as much candy, sodas, or chips as you want—and up to $50 in change a pop.

As soon as the machine reads the dollar you rip it out. It took me a few sacrificed dollars to get it just right, but this dollar right here is the one. I squeezed over a grand out of this buck.

As for the magnet, go to basically any store that has a metal detector, rub the magnet over a product a few times, and it demagnetizes the security device. I won’t tell you how much I got away with using this doohickey, but it’s more than what some people make in a year.

Sometimes I just got lazy and hid stuff in a huge hat on top of my head so that I was taller than the security system, then just walked out. I don’t use these tactics anymore because I’m a good person and I want to build up my credit.

Then we have my homemade marker. I don’t know if they make this flavor of deodorant anymore, but back in the early 90s, Teen Spirit was very popular. This particular style was called Totally Fresh, and it really was.

I’m Asian, so I don’t really smell and didn’t need deodorant until after I got fat, so I took the deodorant part out, cut a chalkboard eraser in half, used candle wax to seal the bottom of the Teen Spirit, filled it halfway with permanent black ink, and then jammed the eraser on top. It’s the fattest homemade marker around. I wrote so much stupid shit on walls with this. And the thing about permanent ink is it takes a million layers of paint to block it out. With only two or three layers to cover it, in about 24 hours the black ink starts to bleed through and win! How many thousands of dollars in property damage can one stick of deodorant leave? The world may never know.