Misguided Intelligence

As much as I'm the first person to admit that I'm radiantly unintelligent, I'm aware that I've had my moments of cleverness--when the stars and planets align and I find myself capable of harnessing my brainpower, the results are often very surprising. I'm either really stupid, or extremely cunning. Unfortunately I've never been especially motivated to apply it to anything that might help me in the long run so my moments of intelligence are usually very petty and entirely self-serving. And occasionally illegal. But--and here's the thing--I always get away with it. The fact that I've spent my life perpetrating schemes to let me break rules and even break federal laws, yet I've never been caught... yeah, that's impressive.

It's a bit disappointing that the only thing I can ever be fucked to apply my intellect to is breaking rules.

My brother was always the golden boy--he never got into trouble at home, at least not when he did shit to me. No matter what he did, whether he hit me or kicked me or broke my things or stole something, he never got into trouble--in fact, I'D get into trouble for tattling. (And I got into trouble for the same behaviours, meaning I learned how to do them surreptitiously and he never did because he never had a reason to--making me infinitely sneakier and a lot more shrewd.) So I learned from a young age that if he was ever going to get his, it wasn't going to be from something he did to me. But that didn't stop me from longing to see him in trouble.

Now, when he was in the first grade his teacher would send home a little index-card sized piece of paper with a happy or sad face on it and the message 'I had a good day at school' or 'I had a bad day at school' written beneath it accordingly. (This was back in the days when parents still tended to look through their children's knapsacks for teacher notes and shit.) These weren't especially complicated missives, just a cut-down piece of paper and written in what appeared to be black crayon. They were so unsophisticated, however, that it occurred to me very quickly that they would be easy to forge. Since my parents took school very seriously, I realized that this would be a golden opportunity to finally see my brother punished.

At the time my parents both worked, so my brother and I were watched at home by a sitter for two or three hours after school every day. This gave me a morsel of time during which to put my plan into action. I took an old note from his teacher and carefully traced the smileyface onto a sheet of computer paper, but with a sad face; then I traced the words, too, with a black crayon to make the writing match the teacher's so it wouldn't be immediately recognizable as a forgery, writing 'bad' in place of 'good'. I cut the paper down to size and, while my brother and the babysitter were elsewhere, replaced the note from his teacher with my forgery.

It worked.

In order to sell it, I had to feign total disinterest in what my parents were upset with my brother about, but in our house the rooms are all connected via ducts, so it's possible to listen to a conversation from anywhere in the house by listening at the vents. I listened in my room to them yelling at him for misbehaving in school--they never called the teacher to find out what he'd supposedly done to warrant the negative note, and it was the first time I ever saw him punished. And I was never caught.

I was eight years old, and I felt invincible.

After this incident I never forged another note from his teacher again. Even at that age I knew lightning wouldn't strike twice and I risked giving myself away if I did it again. The whole thing doesn't seem terribly impressive to adult eyes, but it's a remarkable feat of cunning intelligence in at child too young to be trusted to cross the street safely.

Not all of my schemes were malicious or aimed at getting somebody in trouble. My longest-running scheme was snooping. I was a horrible snoop and my parents actually knew I did it even though they never actually punished me for it more than a few times. It started when I was actually probably about eight (pivotal time for me, I guess?) and found Christmas presents hidden in my parent's bedroom closet, a place completely and totally off-limits to me at the time. There was something weirdly thrilling about being able to find things I wasn't supposed to find and from then on it was an impulse of mine to sneak into my parent's bedroom and look for gifts before I was to get them. I never opened them, nor was I ever tempted to take them--that wasn't what I wanted, rather I just wanted to know what was there. (Except once, when one of the presents was a book that I read in its entirety a few pages at a time during the weeks leading up to Giftmas.) I love knowing the ending before I get to it. I'm the kind of person who reads the last page of a book before they start. I actively look for spoilers for movies, books, video games, and anything else that has a plot. Remember when the last 'Harry Potter' came out a few years ago? Everyone had a shitfit over spoilers being leaked on the internet but I loved it. It meant I knew was was going to happen, mostly, and was protected from being blindsided by a tragedy I didn't see coming.

So I snooped for presents at every opportunity. I only stopped when I moved out.

My parents actually did know I'd been doing it, but it took them a long time to figure it out since I was smart enough to carefully put everything exactly as it had been so there would be no immediate evidence of tampering. Beyond being grounded a few times, there weren't any consequences--instead they just started finding new places to hide presents and the whole thing became like a weird scavenger hunt for me. There was something exciting about outsmarting my parents and I just couldn't stop. I learned to see things an entirely different way and developed an impressive talent for looking at a room and being able to spot potential hiding places that aren't anywhere near obvious. I can still do it. It isn't very useful.

The two tactics that they eventually tried that I'm sure they thought put an end to my snooping only presented a very small obstacle. To keep me from being able to see presents even if I found where they were hidden, they took to wrapping everything as soon as they got it. Obviously there's no way to sneak a peek at wrapped parcels without leaving obvious evidence. But I circumvented that, too, and the way I did it is impressive. All you need is a very thin blade--like a razor or exacto-knife. I used it to carefully slice the tape where the paper was folded and unfold it without ripping it. Once I got a look at what was inside, I folded the paper back up and re-taped it. It's almost impossible to find evidence of this unless you know exactly what to look for--the two layers of tape--and nobody would think to look anyway because nobody would figure out how to do this.

By the early 2000s, online shopping became commonplace and my parents again used this as a way to thwart my sneakiness. They just left everything in their sealed shipping boxes, the theory being the same as with wrapping--you can't get into the box without leaving evidence you've done it. Most online retailers place their shipping labels over the box flaps, meaning that in order to open the box you have to cut through it, which leaves obvious signs of tampering.

This didn't work either.

All I had to do was turn the box over and open it from the bottom. There's never any labels or stickers on the bottom of the box, so there's nothing to cut through that can't be easily camouflaged. I just sliced the tape on the bottom and unloaded the box's contents that way. When I was done I re-packed it and re-sealed the box with the same kind of tape it was originally sealed with.

Not only is this pretty astoundingly clever, it's also kind of illegal. Mail tampering or mail fraud constitute federal crimes, since they involve the postal service which is a federal institution. But I was never caught. Nobody ever worked out that I'd been doing it.

Nothing I described here is at all intuitive. It requires a lot of abstract thought and very well-developed problem-solving skills.

I might not be the smartest cookie, but I'm definitely one of the cunning ones. Even though all I ever did was break the rules, these anecdotes serve as pretty compelling indicators that I am occasionally capable of some pretty clever feats--and the fact that I got away with everything I ever schemed is testament to how far out of the box I can go.