Quote:
Originally Posted by Tactical Z
 Did you spray paint stuff? |
Naw, we lived not too far from the rail yards and some friends and I decided we wanted to break the code on the box car inventory sheet that is on each box car.
So one summer we opened up about 130 box cars over the course of the summer and would take the inventory sheet that was on the outside and write down what was actually in the box car, then put it altogether and broke the code, then opened maybe another 50 or so to prove to ourselelves we had really broken in. We would take the sheet, decode it, then open the car to see if we were right, we were. (It was not really that hard of a code to break).
In any event we did not know that breaking the metal tag/seal on each box car door latch was considered by the law the same as breaking and entering, we didn't steal anything except the inventor sheet or even break anything and we always closed the door.
From the time we got arrested and our parents had to pick us up at the police station and the month it took to see a juvi judge we did not know what they were going to do, the offenses compound, so the charge was 180 some counts of B&E, plus trespessing on rail-road property.
Thankfully we got a judge from the Huck Finn era and he thought the cops were wasting his time when he saw we had not stolen or damaged anything and had broken the code sort of proving the reason we stated for opening the cars was the truth, he tossed all of the charges, even the trespessing one so none of us would have a criminal record.
My life may have worked out a whole lot different had he not seen the "prank" nature of it and sent us all to juvi.
Ironically 5 years later I would join the Navy and end up in Navy Intel with the job of breaking real codes, this time with the help of computers.
