Phoenix Rising BBS/phoenixrising.zip/phoenixrising/misc/ge9.txt

Text File | 1992-09-27 | 21KB | 399 lines

============
SUPERMARKETS
============

     Oswald Rankin doesn't like large supermarket chains.  He has a favorite
game he plays with them, using a least favorite acquaintance as an unwitting
accomplice.  Ossie explains his game.

     "I go to the bulletin board of a store out of my neighborhood and remove
a policy notice from the bulletin board, since the statement is usually printed
on corporate letterhead.  At home, I cut off the letterhead and with rubber
cement, dummy up a blank piece of paper under it to create a new blank piece of
letterhead.  I take this to a self-operated coin photocopy machine and get a
few good copies that are as clean as the original with no smears or lines
showing.

     "I call the corporation and learn who a couple of the vice-presidents are
by name.  Then I type, very carefully and professionally, using a rental
electric typewriter at the local library, a very nice letter to several of my
least favorite acquaintances.  I tell each of them they have won some fabulous
prize at their neighborhood store...like a small color TV set or two hundred
dollars' worth of free groceries, something like that.  I tell them they should
come in Saturday and claim their prize.  I sign the VP's name and mail the
bogus letter.

     "They show up, and the local store manager is puzzled.  He doesn't know
what to do.  It's Saturday, and he can't call the corporate headquarters.  What
does he tell the customers?  Will they get upset with him?  With the store?
What do you think happens Monday?  And beyond?"

     Happy Shopping, Oswald Rankin.

     If you're upset by a large corporation that owns a dairy, here's an old
trick milk truck drivers used to pull on each other a few years back, before
the mammoth agricorporations destroyed competition.  The driver for, say, the
Udderly Sweet Dairy used a medical syringe to inject a few squirts of lemon
concentrate into the milk containers of the Joyful Jugs Dairy.  The customer
who bought Joyful Jugs milk would find the product sour as soon as she/he
opened the container and would storm back to the supermarket to sour their
corporate milk.  It doesn't take too many stormy customers for a supermarket to
dump all over a dairy.

     Today, of course, medical syringes are only a bit tougher to obtain, lemon
concentrate is easily available, and delivery men don't do this to each other
any more because their bosses are all paid by the same international holding
corporation.  But you aren't and can.

     I once interviewed a supermarket manager for an article I wrote on
shoplifting.  I wanted to find out whether Homer Husband and Harriet Housewife
were boosting expensive food as a response to zooming price increases.  The
very first words out of his mouth were, "Ahhh, we refer to that sort of
activity as 'inventory shrinkage' in this business."

     Whatever they call it, a lot of people are doing it.

     Abbie Hoffman has some interesting ways of stealing from markets that have
been targeted for whatever reason:

o     Empty out a pound box of the cheapest margarine you can find and fill it
back up with four sticks of the best butter in the store.

o     Sew a bag inside your overcoat to receive cuts of meat.  Don't be greedy;
you don't want to look too bulky.

o     Two or three phonograph records can be placed inside one of those large
frozen-pizza boxes.

o     Fake an epileptic seizure while your partner, who has already cleaned out
the meat counter, flees during the confusion.

o     According to Hoffman, stolen food tastes a lot better than store-bought.

==============
SWIMMING POOLS
==============

     If your mark has a swimming pool all sorts of additives and accessories
are available for your incursion into a targeted recreation area.  Dyes are a
good choice, and there are many chemicals avaiable to do the job.  Placing
colored dye in the water could create quite an expensive maintenance problem.
Heavy doses of salt will create difficulty for your mark, as will fertilizer
and the bacteria-inducing chemicals sold for septic systems.

     Another swimming-pool additive you could consider is an extract of
toxicodendrol, which is the nonvolatile oil found in the poison-ivy plant so
memorable to legions of its fans from experiences in camping, fishing,
picnicking, loving, or whatever.  If you've ever had a brush with poison ivy,
you can easily imagine what the concentrated extract could do if introduced
into the mark's swimming pool.

     It's not very creative, but you could put dead animals in his/her pool.
That's why you should always keep several large trash or lawn plastic bags in
your car -- you never know when you're going to happen upon an especially
disgusting piece of roadkill.  Generally, for swimming pools, the larger the
dead animal you can manage to get into the mark's pool the better.  Call the
zoo; maybe they'll give you their next dead elephant.  Use a fictitious name
and have the animal sent to a safe mail drop!

     Some of my acquaintances belong to esoteric military units like Special
Forces, SEALS, Blue Light, etc.  One of them recently told me about a non-issue
application of the orange dye marker solution that is normally issued for
air-sea rescue work.

     My friend recalled, "It happened down South, when we were refused
membership in a community swimming pool because (1) we were military types and
(2) two of our five were black dudes.  Since these civilian bozos were so color
conscious, we decided to give the locals some sensitivity training.

     "A friend in Supply got us some orange dye marker, and a week or so later
we pulled a late-night recon mission into enemy territory.  We loaded us their
lily-white pool with orange dye.  Man, does that stuff work -- even better than
we thought!  It messed up the filters and pumps something fierce, and it coated
the bottom and sides of the pool this vivid orange.  Oh yeah, the whole pool
full of water was ruined too.

     "This made local TV coverage, and were the city fathers pissed off!  They
figured it was us military types, but nobody had any courtroom proof.  The
local hoods were afraid to mess with us physically, so the whole thing was a
draw.  It cost them a few thousand bucks to get the pool running again.  By
then, we'd discovered we could enjoy the base pool anyway.  That was our
contribution to making some bigots a bit less discriminatory."

========
TEACHERS
========

     Early one morning before their teacher got to the classroom, some students
painted a large black/brown spot on the ceiling.  With some deft art touches,
it looked as if a huge hole had suddenly broken through.  They piled broken
plaster, ceiling wire, and hunks of lath on the floor beneath the hole.

     The teacher was a priss, and when he came in and saw the mess he pranced
out to inform the principal.  Quickly, the perpetrators cleaned the water paint
off the ceiling and swept up the floor.  They disposed of the residue and trash
on the roof outside of the room.

     When the principal and the teacher returned, the students acted inoccently
concerned about the teacher's sanity.  The principal asked the teacher to
please stop in and see him at the first available moment.  As he left, the
principal stared at the teacher for a long, long time.

     If you don't like a teacher, here's the ticket, according to that veteran
student of human affairs Doug Dedge.  You have to get your mark to a library
where they use an electronic sensor to catch people taking books out of the
place without proper checkout.  Locate your mark.  Then go to the periodicals
section and page through several magazines until you locate and remove several
of the metallic sensor strips.

     Carefully plant these on your mark or on his/her own books, briefcase,
overcoat, or whatever.  The idea is to get multiple plantings.  Perhaps a
diversion could be created to allow you the few seconds needed to plant the
sensors.  Stick around and enjoy the fun when the mark tries to go out the
door.

     Your planted sensors will set off the bell.  This will cause extreme
shock, upset, indignation, and confusion.  With luck, only one sensor will be
found at first, and the mark will try to leave again.  Round two is also yours.

     Because teachers deal with children, they are especially susceptible to
child-molesting charges, deserved or not.  Claude Pendejo's son was accused by
his teacher of cheating on a test and given an F.  The boy, who was quite
innocent, literally cried his innocence.  No one believed him but his parents.
The teacher was especially insolent about the entire matter, refusing to talk
with the parents.  The teachers' union backed their errant member, and that
caused the principal to shy away from the case.

     Claude Pendejo decided that because the teacher had messed up his son, it
was only fitting for the man to become a molestor of a different sort.

     After giving the teacher a couple of months to forget the incident,
Pendejo acted.  One morning, each home in the neighborhood around this school
was posted with a brief letter, run off on a cheap mimeo machine.  The letter
stated that the teacher in question had molested the little child of the
letter's grieving writer -- a scared mother -- and only now did this parent
have the courage to come forth.  The "writer" of the letter said that the
teacher had sexually abused her son on four occasions, and finally the pain and
shame had made him come to his parents for salvation.  The "humble mother" said
the police would do nothing, so she, as a frightened mother, was appealing
directly to other concerned parents for their help in ridding their
neighborhood school of this horrible beast.

     Within three days, the man was blamed (wrongly) for an actual molesting
incident totally unrelated to the scam.  Two other kids came forward and
"confessed" he had made sexual advances to them (he had not).  The man was
waylaid by two fathers and pushed around, his car was trashed, and the
neighborhood cop told him he would have his eye on the man.  The teacher's wife
was a suspicious sort anyway, and this whole thing just fed their marital
fires.  Finally, his supervisor told the man he was too much of a problem and
he ought to consider either moving away or going into a new line of work.  This
happened after the local paper ran a "guilty or no" story on the whole matter.
Since there was no actual proof, the paper was somewhat sympathetic to the
mark.  Eventually, the whole matter burned down to a few embers of suspicion
that would never die out.

=====
THEFT
=====

     Theft and other bits of guerrilla warefare by employees against a despised
corporation have long, deep roots.  Greedy, embittered, politically alienated,
or just plain loose-fingered employees took home an unauthorized twelve billion
dollars in 1979.  This bit of larceny is so easy and requires so little thought
that most experts regard it as little more than another expense of doing
business.

     "We figure the cost of a certain percentage of employee theft right in
with our other costs like rent, advertising, overhead, salaries," says business
economist Ivo Neglagenti.  "Most companies add this cost right into the amounts
they charge the public for goods and services."

     Does that mean if you steal from your employer you are simply stealing
from yourself?  One anti-corporate guerrilla has a ready response:  "Simply
steal more than your share of the cost.  Like the old bromide goes, never steal
anything small, and if you do, do it often."

     Abbie Hoffman gives you the operational details in his classic STEAL THIS
BOOK.  Good luck finding it, though.  It is apparently "out of theft," and no
publisher wishes to reprint it!  Try used-book shops.  It's an instructive
book.

     If you're interested in petty larceny, Loran Eugene suggests you
experiment with various sizes of brass washers in coin-operated vending
machines.  If you don't like a particular newspaper, he suggests you use
number-fourteen washers in their vending machines, remove all the newspapers,
take them into bars and other places, and sell them yourself.

     Braden adds.  "Hey, even if the washers don't operate the machines there's
always the hope they will jam the coin slots.  So you don't really lose in any
case."

     Obviously, some of the radical advocates of rights for ordinary citizens
are both preaching and practicing theft as a form of fighting back.  I was
brought up to believe that stealing is not nice.  On the other hand, maybe some
of these antiestablishment tactics aren't really stealing.  I leave the
decision to you.

     Most modern philosophers recognize a major difference between theft for
fun, for survival, for a career, and for protest purposes.  As the premier
corrections officer Wallace R. Croup points out, "A common thief will steal
from anyone, whereas a protestor will steal only from his institutional enemy
-- a corporation, utility, or some other establishment target."

     Even so, maybe you still have a moral block about theft.  If so, think how
thin the dividing line is between business as usual and stealing.  Some of the
Detroit auto companies know that their products are dangerous death traps; yet
they sell them anyway.  You pay nine dollars for a tiny container of a
prescription drug.  Do you really believe that the compound drug costs that
much?  Talk to a salesperson for a large drug company if you doubt me.  I wish
you could see the breakdown of costs in producing laundry detergent.  I worked
in advertising.  I saw those figures, and know how many dollars you have to pay
for how few cents' worth of materials and labor.

     There is a very thin line between business and theft.

=======
TOILETS
=======

     If you enjoy playing in the potty without blowing one up, consider this
trick.  Saturate a large dry sponge with a thick starch solution.  Squeeze it
tightly as possible with tough string.  Allow the whole thing to dry
thoroughly.  Then remove the string, and the sponge will stay in its compressed
state.  Put it, or as many as you've made into targeted toilets, flush the
sponge down, and walk away from the fun.

     It may take a while for the sponge to become wet enough to expand solidly.
Have patience -- it will do so soon.  For your purposes, you probably hope it
is farther down the drainage system than is convenient for a repairperson to
get to easily.  Holy backup!

     If you have some of that poison-ivy extract left over from the section on
swimming pools, heed Ed Hoover's story.  As a kid, Ed obtained some extract of
toxicodendrol (poison ivy) and applied it liberally to the toilet paper in the
counselors' outhouse at his summer camp.  He said he later did the same thing
to the officers' latrine while serving Uncle Sam.  Maybe Ed just has this
problem with authority figures.  Even so, that's a lot more comfortable than
the problems his authority figures got wiped out with.

     Mower McMurphy sticks closely to commodes.  Like the sticker man from
Boulder, McMurphy has a very sharp, nasty mind and uses creative revenge.  One
of his classics is to have official-looking warnings printed on permastick
stock.  When, for some reason, he gets irritated at someone or something in a
bar, office building, school, or utility, he will post each restroom stall in
the area.

     Each sticker bears an official-looking seal and signature around the
message, which reads:  DANGER:  THIS RESTROOM OFF-LIMITS DUE TO INFECTIOUS
VENEREAL DISEASE.  STAY OUT FOR YOUR OWN HEALTH PROTECTION.

     In another campaign, McMurphy printed up graffiti-style stickers, which he
posted over toilet-paper dispensers in the bathroom of least-favorite marks.
The stickers read:  WARNING:  THIS TOILET PAPER HAS BEEN INFECTED WITH A HIGHLY
CONTAGIOUS NEW STRAIN OF ASIAN GONORRHEA.  Uh-huh -- I know what you're
thinking.  But, would you really take the chance anyway?

     Now, if you wish to be discriminatory, this next trick works best in a
bathroom frequented by women.  According to nationally known sexist Butch
Bryant, it is also an old trick -- cheap bathroom humor, Butch calls it.  A gay
sort, though, Butch will always settle for a laugh.  Butch once said, "A cheap
thrill is better than no thrill."

     Lift the seat of the commode, then stretch and place Saran Wrap very
tightly across the top of the bowl so no creases show.  Then lower the seat
gently.  The trap is set.

     Ideally, the mark will come dashing in, sit, and let loose.  Your humorous
imagination can finish the rest of this trick, when the trap is sprung, so to
speak.  Butch Bryant says this works best in barrom johns.  Anything you say,
Butch.

==========
LA TURISTA
==========

     If your mark is traveling into Mexico or some South or Central American
country, or even into Canada, you could consider doing your duty as an
honorable citizen and reporting your suspicions to the authorities of that
country that he/she is a drug dealer.  It might help to sneak some drugs into
the mark's car, luggage, or clothing prior to his or her hitting a border
point.  If you are kindhearted you will have the discovery made on the U.S.
side of the border.  If not?  Hey, this is only a book.  It's his/her life.


===
VIP
===

     We've all tried to get that always unavailable Very Important Person Who
Can Solve Our Problem on the telephone.  But that Important Person always is
tied up, is in a meeting, or just stepped out of the office.  So after you
waste your time calling him or her in vain a few times, do it yet one more
time.

     This time come armed with the name of the chief executive officer of the
company.  Get that from the main switchboard operator.  When the unavailable
Very Important Person's flunky starts to give you the runaround again, sternly
tell the flunky something like this:

     "I didn't want to bring [use full name of the chief executive] into this
little matter.  I thought your [use name of very important person here] could
handle this him/herself.  I guess not.  Well, I'm calling [first name of chief
executive] for a luncheon soon, and I can just ask him/her about this matter
then."

     No person wants the superior, especially the chief executive, to think
that he/she is incapable of handling routine matters.  Beyond that, the fact
that you have namedropped adds a dimension few bureaucratic managers care to
call as a bluff.  It's easier and cheaper to finally talk to you -- and satisfy
you.

============
WATER WELLS!
============

     People who live outside the lines of municipal services provide their own
utilities, one of which is a water well.  Normally, these wells are topped by a
simple metal cap held in place by several set screws.  It takes only a few
minutes to loosen the screws, remove the cap, and dump a load of modest-sized
roadkill, such as squirrels, small rabbits, rats, birds, etc., down the well
casing.  Replace the cap and tighten the screws, and the mark will be none the
wiser.  For a while.

     Water wells are usually purified once a year by adding a gallon of a
chlorine bleach, such as Clorox, to the well.  This process also oxidizes the
iron in the water, turning the liquid a dirty rusty color.  The water now
stinks and tastes awful.  To demolish the quality of your mark's water supply
for at least a week, dump about ten to fifteen gallons of bleach down the well.

     Barfo Renchquist got his nickname as you might imagine.  His favorite
water-well trick is to eat all sorts of multi-colored greasy junk food, like
pizza.  He drinks a lot of beer, too.  Primed and loaded, he is driven to the
mark's water well.  The well cap is removed, and Barfo positions himself over
the well casing and pulls the trigger by sticking his finger down his throat.
Barfo does his thing -- all of it down the well.  The well cap is replaced.

     "It works best when they don't have too fine a filter on their pump and
some of the small pieces of puke come out the house taps.  A lot of the color,
smell and taste almost always comes through.  It's a very demoralizing stunt,"
Barfo reports.

======
WILLS!
======

     If you have a least-favorite friend, relative, or other family member you
want to shame in front of the others, write him/her into your last will and
testament.  Simply instruct your attorney to include a codicil to the effect
that "I bequeath all my yachts, silver plate, gold bullion and coins, foreign
holdings, carriages, and aircraft to [name of mark]."  Obviously, you had best
not have any of those items, or you suddenly become the mark.  This stunt is a
blow from the grave.  Maybe you won't know how it works.  Maybe, though, you
will.  Is there revenge after death?

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