Cheap Thrills: Plant-napping

 There is a co-worker that in my opinion neglects his plants. In fairness, the past two years has been a mix of remote work, and perhaps for that reason, he is very rarely physically in the office. He has come in a handful of times the past year at best. He has plants that are clearly crowding their pot. They are also starting to dry up from neglect.

I have a plan to covertly plant-nap them and take them home on a weekend, and free up a plant or two into smaller pots, before returning the larger pot back to his desk the next week. In my mind, this is akin to relieving a negligent dog owner of the privilege to own a dog. Will he even notice? Seems unlikely. 

I imagine this is like the thrill of breaking the law in some small, mostly harmless way. The thrill of shoplifting, perhaps? I have not engaged in shoplifting myself, although I have declined to correct the cashier when they forgot to ring up an item or two in my cart. There have also been times when I forgot to ring up items that were at the bottom of my cart. And while the value of those ill-gotten items was very small, it was still a thrill to take them home thinking that I did not pay for it, and I broke the law (unknowingly, with an assist from the cashier). 

A middle-aged white-collar professional living a stable life in a firmly middle-class suburb. That's me. This may be as close as I come to the adrenaline rush of an outlaw life; taking a sapling from a crowded, neglected pot from a coworker without his permision. We all gotta get our thrills somewhere.