It was early June and I had been working at the Solano drive-in, located in the scenic back lot of the local one runway airport, for not more than two months. Working the swap meet that took place during the hours when it would have been most appropriate to be inside an open garage sneaking a cigarette and listening to the old man's record collection I committed the first act that would begin a life built upon crime.

Between the generous donations gratefully accepted from relatives and the few dollars I was able to scrape together from the poor job I worked, I had finally been able to achieve the dream for which I had worked all my life, up to that point, to accomplish. I was the proud owned of a 1972 VW super beetle. With the twenty-five dollar stereo I had purchased and the speakers my friend James had helped me to install with the over-zealous use of a table saw, I was able to get myself to my job at 5:30 am, as required by the new position recently acquired demanded.

I had been given a promotion of sorts. My days of the snack counter, serving coffee to the same tired faces every weekend was over. The time spent in the sun behind the burger grill listening to the only station which the standard issue radio received, a bizarre mix of oldies and Spanish language music, and eating all the burgers I could on the sly were done. Two months of Employee of the Month mandated that I was to be given the most responsible position someone at the tender age of sixteen could achieve at the drive-in. I was going to "work the box" as the jargon said it.

Working the box at the drive-in was no small feat. It was a crash course of accounting that took place in a four-by-three foot scratched plexi-glass air-conditionless booth at the entrance of the home of a dying form of entertainment. In the dim light of the early mornings the box was the gatekeeper for the lines of trucks carrying loads of merchandise of questionable value and origin. Later it became the gates of heaven for the early rising bargain shoppers who had nothing better to do on a Saturday or Sunday morning. Everyone paid.

I had worked the box for a week when I was called into the office of the drive-in. It was nothing more than a room that could have been a bombshelter proto-type with its painted cinderblock walls and slit windows re-inforced with presumably steel rebars. It was inhabited by a gruff man and his two trolls who left the office in his stead to bring his message of inevitable doom to those not careful enough to stay out of his path. I had slipped up somewhere along the line. He wanted to see me.

Behind a desk that seemed dwarfed by his gut which rested on it, his face betrayed a look of obvious displeasure. His white beard, stained and streaked by the various colors of the condiments on the hot dog which he ate bobbed up and down causing minor ripples on the surface of his belly. I waited until he finished his food. When he had completed his meal he looked at me for a minute before grunting, "Your totals don't add up."

"Sorry," I asked not sure of what he was taking about, tucking in the parts of my red polo-shirt that had come out during the frenzy that is the early morning box duty at the same time to make sure I was presentable.

"Your box totals don't add up. According to the number of singles in your drawer thirty-five hundred people came in today, but only thirty-two hundred tickets have been handed out." Ah, I thought. That's how they know how much money should be in the till at the end of the day. "I'm going to write you up if you don't correct the situation." He waved his hand absently as if to say that he was through with me.

"But sir," I started, stopping as he looked at me under his long salt and pepper eyebrows. "Sir, people don't want to take the tickets. They... they just want to get in."

He stood up. Not an easy task for a man his size, but aided by the fact that his belly never left the top of the desk, surely reducing the amount of the weight his body needed to pick up with it. "Deny them entry then," he screamed at me as loud as he could. His trolls didn't even move. "They don't get in if they don't have a ticket!"

I left the office breathing heavily with the relief that I had left with my legs still intact. It was short lived however. People were not going to take the tickets and I knew that my days were numbered, to say nothing of my streak for Employee of the Month. So it was with not a little trepidation that returned to my station. As far as I was concerned that day was through and I would pick up fresh the next week.

It was during the pre-dawn drive to the drive-in, when there was no one on the suburban streets but the occasional stray dog and teenager on their way to work, that I had my epiphany. If I could not get people to take the tickets, which was undoubtedly what my employer wanted but which was an impossibility greater than my ever getting a raise at my retched job, then I would pocket the difference and no one would be the wiser if I were careful to not be greedy. Suddenly the job that paid after taxes about a hundred and fifty dollars every two weeks was bringing in a little more than two hundred dollars every week. I started shopping.

My friend Nathan had just recently received a new computer through a grant of some sort which was the envy of my very being. Together he and I started to price out what it would take for me to purchase a comparable system and I saved the pennies which I had filched from the drive-in. As I started coming home with computer components my father, the man who had raised me with the belief that were I to be honest and work hard enough money would come, watched as I built my first computer and applauded the fact that his son was able to do so much with so little money.

As it would happen, the revolution that Wired Magazine had predicted actually happened and the Internet became the Next-Big-Thing. The purchase of my computer happened shortly before, enabling me to learn the basic skills necessary to pick up a job at the local newspaper as a web programmer before leaving high school. And while I never stole anything more than a pad of Post-It notes from any other employer, my life is one that is based upon one act of criminal behavior.