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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/Leftunders on 2024-10-21 12:04:05+00:00.
tl;dr: I stole a LOT of caramel syrup that was stacked up outside a Mcdonald's near my house. Found out that it's not all that tasty in bulk and doesn't go down a sink without protest.
So when I was a teen (not "today,") I used to live not far from a McDonald's.
I was on the HS swim team, and practices were held at the horrible hour of 5AM. My parents were less than enthusiastic about dropping me off that early, so I had to get up at 4AM just to bike there. Cutting through a gap in the fence of the McDonald's store's parking lot saved me a couple of blocks, so I would force my bike through the hedge and go on my sad, lonely way.
There were several days where I'd see huge stacks of buns and other stuff outside the store's side entrance. I don't know if there was some kind of drop-off from trucks, or daily delivery or whatever. I suppose (although I never checked) that the delivery was only for non-perishables. There must have been some other arrangement for things like meat, eggs, produce, etc. The timing was odd, but maybe the truck had an early route, and that was the first store? Hard to say. For reasons that will become obvious, I never asked.
One day, I noticed the stack of supply pallets had a bunch of #10 cans on them. When I got closer, I saw the label identifying them as the gooey caramel sauce that McDonald's used for their sundays. I liked that shit. It was awesome. It being just after 4:00AM, my brain wasn't working all that well, so I decided I would take one of them with me to school and me and my teammates would eat it with a spoon. Best day ever!
But then I thought: What if we eat all of the syrup? That would leave none for me when I had ice cream at home. Who was I to deny my family their share of tasty caramel sundays? Solution: Zip on home and get something more cargo capable than a tricked-out Schwinn with a banana seat and chopper handlebars.
In all of five minutes, our family's Dodge Dart was loaded down with ten #10 cans of caramel syrup. I drove it home, made as little noise as I could unloading and hiding the cans, and then booked it back to school on my bike.
Stealing what was probably a couple of months' worth of sunday topping for a single McDonald's is probably enough to qualify as a FU, but I've found that this subreddit expects consequences, even if they aren't all that consequential. There were several.
The first thing I realized after successfully pulling off the one and only "heist" of my abbreviated criminal career was that you really couldn't open one of those #10 cans without somewhere to put all the stuff inside of it. I could maybe consume a couple of spoonfulls of caramel syrup at a time. Any more than that, and it started tasting awful. Deliciously awful, but still awful. So that left the problem of what to do with the rest of the syrup.
So on the first day I decided to enjoy the fruits of my juvenile delinquency, I ended up attempting to pour the majority of a #10 can of McDonald's caramel syrup down my family's bathroom sink. Fun fact: caramel syrup does not go gently into that good night. It clogged up the sink almost immediately, leaving me in the ONE bathroom in our tiny single-family abode with a mostly full #10 ten can of thick vanilla-flavored goodness, a sink filled about 1/3 of the way up with the rest of it, and a growing line of siblings pounding on the door clamoring to get in so they can pee.
Running hot water into the sink only helped a tiny bit. It diluted the syrup IN the sink but did nothing to unclog what must have been the world's largest Heath Bar lodged in the P-trap under the vanity. Even the plunger had no effect. In desperation, I used my cupped hands to transfer as much syrup and brownish sweet water from sink to toilet, flushing as often as the tank would fill up.
The sink mostly emptied, I then attempted to clean up. But we kept cleaning supplies in the linen closet OUTSIDE of the bathroom, so all I had on hand were towels and toilet paper. I didn't dare try to use the towels- my mom would have killed me! So I tried using the toilet paper. Which is when I learned that caramel syrup sticks to counters, toilet seats, walls, floors, etc. much harder than it sticks to toilet paper. All I really managed to do was add a layer of Charmin to the mess on every surface between sink and toilet.
Finally, faced with a "Heeeeere's Johnny!" moment from a pair of angry siblings, I opened the door. My older brother took one look at the place and said "holy fuck! What were you doing in here? Did you shit in the sink?" Which, to be fair, was a reasonable first impression for someone seeing brown smears all over sink, counter, and toilet seat.
Which led to my real Fuck Up of the day: I just went with it. Somehow, it made more sense at the time to confess to blowing out the sink's pipes with an enormous load of feces than to admit that I had stolen a giant can of McDonald's caramel syrup. Value judgements were not my forte at the time.
I don't remember what lame excuse I made. "Yeah, the toilet was clogged, so I didn't have any choice," I probably said. And then I grabbed some Formula 409 out of the linen closet and started spraying it everywhere, despite my brothers' increasingly agitated peepee dances.
Never the brightest bulbs in the shed, they both accepted my lame explanation, satisfied perhaps with an admission of guilt and the potential for giving me a hard time about shitting in the sink. Which they did for many decades, often, and with great enthusiasm. And so I became that one weird cousin who shits in the sink. "Don't let /u/Leftunder use your bathroom! He'll shit in your sink!" they'd say whenever we visited the aunts & uncles. Of course, I'd be helpless to defend myself. "It was really just a lot of caramel syrup" would have demanded too much awkward explanation.
And there was a third, less impactful consequence: When I bragged about my haul to my closest fellow teenage reprobates, one of them made the astute observation that those #10 cans were probably super expensive. I forget the math, but we concluded that I had committed the equivalent of grand theft auto in McDonald's caramel syrup. So instead of getting to enjoy the fruits of my labor, we ended up opening just one more can, each spooning out enough to make us physically ill, and then dumping out the rest in the woods. Somewhere there is a dynasty of ants worshiping the Divine Provider that poured the manna from heaven that fed their colony for untold generations.
Oh, and add one more: After the wake-up call of realizing I had committed a felony, I decided that cutting through the McDonald's parking lot wasn't a good idea, nor was being noticed as the one guy riding a bike at 4:30AM every day. The ace detective they assigned to solve the Great Syrup Caper of 1978 would surely put 2&2 together, and all it would take is one blood sugar reading to prove my guilt. So I quit the swim team. Which wasn't all that big of a deal since I was a shitty swimmer and actually hated getting up that early anyway.