Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?

Unintentional instances of law breaking usually include theft. In general, I’m very respectful of other people’s property (I might hide something though, that’s maybe not super respectful, I guess) and I’ve always been financially lucky or stable enough that I’ve never felt the need to steal. I don’t really get any sort of thrill from such things as other’s might. I think perhaps the most egregious intentional thefts were some food and drinks while working at a fast food place as a teenager, which if you have worked food service, you know is fairly rampant. So the list is small and accidental:

Once pocketed a silver mercury dime at work intending to switch it out with a normal one from my car, but completely forgot it was in my pocket until I got home. Later, I did the same with a buffalo head nickel.

One year I decided to buy a nice big pot to try to grow some flowers in. I was quite unsuccessful, but kept trying every other year. At the end of one such unsuccessful season, after having owned the pot for about 5ish years, I emptied it and went to go rinse it out and it appeared to fall apart in my hands. Upon further investigation, I discovered it was actually two pots stuck together. I had only needed one, been convinced it was one, so had only paid for one. The inner one still had the barcode on the bottom. Whoops?

Also a semi-intentional one: we had a girl working in the pharmacy that would grab the occasional toy and leave it without buying it in the pharmacy. It was during the time that fidget spinners were really popular, so she had brought a nice hefty metal one in. It hung out in the pharmacy so long and had been messed with so much that it no longer had a barcode and we no longer even sold the item. We had to do a deep clean and remove a lot of clutter, so we were going to just throw it away. I decided to take it home instead.

A hardened criminal, indeed.