During high school, my best friend and I both had paper routes next to each other, and we would often team up together delivering to make the work go more quickly. These were morning routes, and we were usually on the job at about 5 or 6 a.m. I'm still surprised I had this job as long as I did, as I'm definitely not a morning person. In fact, once while delivering I fell asleep walking, and didn't wake up until I tripped over a curb after apparently having crossed the street. But it's a very interesting time of the day, because you are remarkably free from surveillance, which isn't necessarily a good thing for high school kids.
After our routes, my friend and I would seek out some form of diversion, usually two hour Gauntlet games at the nearby convenience store, but occasionally we found more creative pastimes. On one such occassion, we were walking along a street that cuts through a strip mall in the neighborhood. (In fact, true fact, no less, the World's Longest Strip Mall. My fingers are trembling with passionate pride.) We passed the back loading dock of a furniture rental company and noticed a number of pieces of old furniture that had been left out to be discarded (we presumed :). This was obviously a flagrant waste of resources, and we decided this furniture needed a better home. So over the next half hour we assembled an entire living room suite (pronounced "suit" here in the Hoosier State :) in front of the Savings and Loan on the corner, complete with sofa, love seat, and several other pieces. We were en route with our final item, a large chest of drawers, and smugly envisioning our likely pictorial spread in Good Housekeeping when a patrol car passed by and quickly began a U-turn. We figured we weren't up to the challenge of explaining why we'd furnished the nearby business, let alone what we were doing carrying furniture down the middle of a city street at 6 a.m., so we abandoned the drawers and fled. While I won't claim responsibility, the S&L later failed, and is now a lingerie shop.
Another fine morning, we were passing behind another part of the same strip mall and noticed a dumpster with several dozen extra-long fluorescent light tubes left in it. This dumpster happened to be located beside a fire escape that went up about 30 feet, and thus was born the great sport of Fluorescent Light Tube Javelin. Points in this fine form of recreation are awarded for a) distance, b) style and technique, c) impact radius, and d) the associated sound effect. Surprisingly, I've yet to see this as an Olympic event.
In another incident, I was delivering early one New Year's Eve, and met my friend who was doing the same. It was trash night, and there were a great many discarded Christmas trees around the neighborhood left for pickup. My friend and I concluded that these, too, needed new homes. One large tree became a very, very snug resident of the phone booth beside the S&L previously mentioned. The remaining trees, at least a dozen, we left to grace the porch and lawn of a particularly cranky subscriber. The gentleman in question, I gather, called the paper to complain about the forest he had suddenly acquired, but could never prove anything.