The Thing About Stealing Underwear...

I saw something on the news last night about a dude who got busted for stealing close to a hundred pairs of women's thong underwear out of his college's laundry room. And, of course, it reminded me of something from my past.

In my college days, I had a pal whose dorm room gave him a strategic vantage point of one of the campus laundry room. What this dude would do is sit lazily by his eighth-floor window, tucked neatly out of view of passersby on the ground below, and wait for the hottest chicks to come by to use the washing machine.

After he watched them exit the laundry room -- with their unmentionables tucked safely in the whirlwind of the spin cycle -- he'd get out his own laundry bag, and head on down (at this point, I should probably mention that each of our campus laundry rooms contained just one washer and one dryer). Once inside the laundry room, he'd sift through the booty in the washer before him, grabbing anything even slightly resembling female underwear, and stuffing it in his bag. Then he'd walk back to his room nonchalantly, giving any onlookers the impression that he's just another sad sack who wants to do his laundry but has to wait for the friggin' machine to free up. Little did they know that he had just added to what amounted to one of the largest collections of pilfered underwear that I, myself, can recall.

What's the point of all this? Hell, I don't know. The thought of a guy collecting women's underwear -- even as proof of sexual conquest -- seems a bit odd, even to a perv like me. But there is definitely an allure to women's undergarments that can sometimes get the better of the male species. That's why walking into Victoria's Secret is like a religious experience for most guys.

Yes, the embarrassment factor is high; wander too close to the dressing rooms and you feel like a pervert, let your hand rest a bit too long on that camisole and you feel like a cross-dresser. But there's something about the smell, the atmosphere and the sales assistants that makes my heart do the flippy-flop every time.

And let's not even mention the incredibly uplifting feeling you get when you see a red hot mama casually sifting through a sales rack of thongs. It is, I can only hope, what heaven feels like.

Anyway, there was a point to this. And that point is that if stealing women's underwear from the dryer is a crime, then the terrorists have truly won.