“Fine, go and steal a car then!”

– A Bible study leader whose iden­tity will remain anonymous.

Last night Stealthy Selo, Mau­rad­ing Mark, Get­away Gem and I stole and pro­ceeded to dis­man­tle a car.

2231: Get­away Gem pulls up out­side a house in sub­ur­ban Matrav­ille. There is an anx­ious wait for all the car’s occu­pants; the Insider is not yet Inside, and thus sev­eral ner­vous min­utes were spent in con­tention over who would play Jaw­breaker (alas, there was no Bejeweled).

2240: The Insider arrives in an unmarked vehi­cle. Stealthy Selo moves in to ren­dezvous point, con­tact is made. The Insider pro­ceeds inside: but there is a com­pli­ca­tion! The keys have been obscured, so a fur­ther accom­plice is required on the Inside. The accom­plice suc­ceeds in return­ing with a key — but it is the wrong one! With much trep­i­da­tion, he returns inside on a sec­ond recon­nais­sance task, this time emerg­ing with the cor­rect keys. The car in ques­tion had already been entered, but hot-wiring cars remains mar­gin­ally beyond even our elite covert-ops abilities.

2252: Stealthy Selo climbs into the car, which is sit­u­ated on a slight incline. With­out start­ing the engine, we release the hand­brake and roll/push the car some thirty meters from the house. Get­away Gem waits fur­ther up the street: she clicks on her lights, and starts her car as Stealthy Selo climbs into front pas­sen­ger seat, Maraud­ing Mark the back, and I the driver’s. The Appro­pri­ated Vehi­cle starts first time (!!) and I pull out with Gem following.

2303: The con­voy arrives at HQ, where­upon cars are parked, shuf­fled, and re-arranged so as to enable suf­fi­cient access to the Appro­pri­ated Vehicle.

2330: The Appro­pri­ated Vehi­cle is emp­tied (no mea­gre task), and var­i­ous clean­ing com­mences. Simul­ta­ne­ously, the destruc­tion begins.

In this process, a few strange things are dis­cov­ered: not to be deterred, we con­tin­ued in our quest to install a fridge. We needed power in the boot of the car… and, short of remov­ing the entire dash, the best we could do was steal­ing it from the cig­a­rette lighter socket. If we had more time, I would have tapped the back of the lighter socket’s power and re-crimped the ter­mi­nals before replac­ing it, but we didn’t (have time). A small casu­alty for a completely-useless-but-rather-cool addi­tion to the boot of any car!

We were fin­ished by about 2:20 am this morn­ing, and un-appropriated the vehi­cle in due fash­ion before mak­ing an escape in the Odyssey, which had been deposited there ear­lier that evening in a cun­ning manou­ver orches­trated by Get­away Gem’s stealthy sedan (I really can’t remem­ber if it’s a sedan or not, but cheesy allit­er­a­tive effects are too good to be passed up! Read it and CRINGE! Muwa­ha­haha. And it was stealthy. Appro­pri­ately miss­ing an inte­rior light, her car could have snuck up on any­one!). All was done by 2:40… some eight-and-a-half hours later our covert adven­tures were uncovered.

Happy birth­day, Tim!

Full cov­er­age avail­able in this Flickr pho­to­set. We were kind of busy and not tak­ing pho­tos often-enough, so maybe there’ll be some pho­tos of the fridge itself in the not-too-distant future!

Tags: Bible study leader, Matraville