Why you shouldn't steal drinks from a boys' hostel

Warning: This blog post could potentially make you lose your eating/drinking appetite. If you are about to munch your dinner or sip your red wine, you are strongly advised NOT to read this entry below.

Remember, you have been warned.

In our boarding school, stealing food or drinks from the hall fridge is deemed equal to stealing US$10,000. Whether you are caught stealing a serving of Ferrero Roche from the fridge or caught stealing an LCD monitor from the prep room, it is quite likely that you will be taken to the police.

For Singaporean offenders, the penalty would be several months of imprisonment in the infamous Changi prison.

For non-Singaporean offenders, the penalty would be deportation.

And yeah, that's what you get if you are caught stealing.

But sometimes it's not so easy to know who has stolen your food or drinks from the fridge, since there is no CCTV installed in the hall kitchen. I once lost a bottle of Milo that I had bought from NTUC FairPrice, and I blamed myself for being so trustful of other boarders to put my drinks in my hall fridge.

Stealing food is always safe, because anyone could always check for expiration date in the food's box.

But stealing drink isn't necessarily so.

Now I am about to tell you a widely known real story passed down from batches of seniors in my Singapore boarding school. It happened a couple of years back, long before I graduated from Primary school myself.

Back in the late 1990s, there was a student who was infuriated to know that his beverages -whether it was Coke, Milo, or lemon tea- was drunk by someone else every time he kept his drinks at the common fridge. A bottle of Coke that he had 3/4 full on one night could only have 1/4 of the remaining contents left on the next morning.

Reporting the case to the hallmaster/halltutor would be useless, since nobody could possibly keep a watch on the fridge at a 24-hour-standby mode anyway.

So, as to avenge that mysterious drinker, he came up with an ingenious solution.

He bought a bottle of lemon tea which he drank 1/4 from. Then he urinated to that empty 1/4 as to make it look like it is almost full.

Since lemon tea is of the same colour as urine, it could easily pass to the unobservant eye as the same liquid.

He kept that "lemon tea" trap in the fridge one night and waited anxiously the whole night for the "lemon tea" to be "stolen".

On the next day, he checked the fridge and found that the 'lemon tea' he had kept the night before only had half of the remaining contents left.

He smiled satisfactorily to himself and quickly announced his 'celebrated victory' to the entire boarding school.

No one knows what kind of response did the mysterious drinker generate after he known that he had consumed urine (because nobody ever owned up), but it is safe to assume that that 'lemon tea case' helped to deter a lot of people from stealing fridge drinks after the story is passed thru batches of ACSians for years afterwards.