"If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'"

Reminds me of an incident early in my career. I was developing embedded software and needed an expensive, specialized signal analyzer. Management refused to purchase or assign one to me. I was stuck sharing with my lead, which was highly inconvenient for both of us.

Well, turns out one of those analyzers was assigned to a guy (Dave) about to retire. I wandered over to Dave's cube the day after he left and sure enough, there is my much-needed analyzer. It is poorly locked to a table leg by a rather long cable. So I tilted up the table, slid the cable off the bottom of the leg, lugged the analyzer to my office and enjoyed an relaxing afternoon of debug.

I got a nice talking-to from management once they realized what happened. And most importantly, became the new assignee of Dave's analyzer.