Taping a hair across a doorway or cabinet so you'll know if people have been up in your shit.

every time i see or hear about this i kind of WANT an excuse to do it just because it seems so badass and James Bond

everyone does it all the time in the tinker tailor soldier spy thread!

smiley of course uses chips of hand-fashioned artisanal oak inserted above and below the lock

what? this is a going concern on ilx? I gotta check that out.

wtf at this? Just administer the truth drug when you get home like everyone else

no tape, that would let them know that you know that they know

I do this, but I got it from 'Dr No' - first Bond film ...

i did this occasionally as a kid but it was never disturbed. few feelings are more forlorn.

the spy who ignored me

I always thought that Bond's hair stuck in place because it had so much Brylcreem on it?

you would need ned raggett length hair for a door way.

this is one of the only things i remember from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

best use of this = Misery

I go the high-tech route: http://s.shld.net/is/image/Sears/spin_prod_254831701?hei=248&wid=248&op_sharpen=1&resMode=sharp&op_usm=0.9,0.5,0,0

i think it was in lacarre's a perfect spy where the protagonist does something equivalent on his desk, where the seemingly haphazard arrangement of objects is intentional -- scissor blades deliberately pointed at other objects on the desk, etc -- so he knows whether anyone has gone through his stuff. i think this is pretty elementary tradecraft for intelligence operatives? or at least it is in lacarre novels.

I've used baby powder to dust a thumb-latch on a door to see if our creepy landlord came into our apt while we were gone. He didn't do it that time, but we moved out anyway.

I just keep venomous snakes and scorpions in all my drawers.

i have done this! learned it from my father.

i contort my body and crawl inside the drawer and wait. you should see their faces!

there's a rocky and bullwinkle episode where they come back to their hotel room in pottsylvania (the country where everyone's a spy and everything's a secret) and it's been completely ransacked and trashed, and bullwinkle says SOMEBODY'S BEEN IN HERE! I KNOW BECAUSE WHEN WE WENT OUT, THAT BLOTTER WAS FACING THE OTHER DIRECTION

Sure. If you have weird roomates or suspicious office personel who would know but the snoop? I learned the hard way that sending out a polite e-mail asking if someone saw my pencil sharpener can rub people the wrong way.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

my mother used to mark the levels on the rear labels of the bottles of liquor in the bar... my sisters got busted.

This is how I learned to replace what I consumed with water.

How can you tell you don't disturb it when you enter the room?

heh shasta my dad used to keep his (infrequently-used) vodka in the freezer and my brother would siphon off a few shots at a time for his friends and replace with water and then one day my dad went to get it for some guests and the bottle was frozen solid

I have never needed to do this

I'm not opposed to it on principle

The only time I suspected someone was going through my things and stealing from me is when I had a really crazy roommate, so while I thought about doing something like this I wouldn't know what to do with the information once I had it since she was too twitchy to confront.

This is very familiar to people who keep a diary, especially if you have siblings or a nosy mom or something. Just put a bunch of made up crap in it. Only problem with that is once something is written down, you start to believe it, because it's your secret personal journal. Hard to overcome that youth conditioning.

arranging stuff in my room and/or on my desk *just so* and memorizing its placement was like my specialty as a kid
also trying to memorize where everything was in a room
just in case! spies!

things that happen when everything you know about the cold war is via re-runs of 60s tv shows and movies
children of the meta-cold-war

heh shasta my dad used to keep his (infrequently-used) vodka in the freezer and my brother would siphon off a few shots at a time for his friends and replace with water and then one day my dad went to get it for some guests and the bottle was frozen solid

― max, Tuesday, September 13, 2011 4:23 PM (4 hours ago)

haha, that is awesome!

One of the major turning points in my life was when I realized that my mother knew everything that went on in my life, every emotion, everything that happened, no matter how much I tried to hide out from her. It wasn't that she was spying on me (although she did some of that), it's just...it was just like I was on display at all times. I had some elaborate rituals I did (moving things back into order when I left the room, things like that), but nothing worked.

Ahhhh, mum power working at full capacity. I swear mine can see right through me, she could shoot lasers out of her eyes with enough practice.

Have never even heard of this

me either!

http://www.usborne.com/images/covers/eng/width_223px/86964.jpg

^ I had this book as a kid and it was full of all this stuff. The other similar trick I remember is that you can take two large sheets of paper, spread a thick but even layer of strawberry jam between them, and then place it all underneath your door mat. If anyone then enters the room, they'll leave a footprint behind. Kind of lo-fi, it's like a child's interpretation of what a honeypot trap might be.

The Man With The Golden Shred

On Her Majesty's Secret Preserves etc

Gah, crippling attack of nostalgia on seeing that cover. Had so many Usborne books as a kid

There was a detective one as well iirc. All the same tricks but with different hats.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I did something truly evil once, but only because my co-workers NEVER use my computer. I was always the last one to leave the office at night. Once in a while I'd see a suspicious person or two hanging about as I was leaving. I started leaving a thumbtack in the fabric of the chair face up...if anyone used my computer overnight, they'd get a tack in their butt!

wow!

i would so forget i'd done that and then want to sue myself

I've used baby powder to dust a thumb-latch on a door to see if our creepy landlord came into our apt while we were gone. He didn't do it that time, but we moved out anyway.

― Octavia Butler's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiised (Laurel)

friggin fantastic

Hahaha. It was because one day we saw our upstairs neighbors leave the house, then we saw the LL drive up and heard him go up their stairs and open and close stuff in their apt while they were gone.

Also he asked us if he could continue to store some boxes of his stuff in our front hall closet, and when we looked, they turned out to be vintage Playboy/Penthouse and porn.

His name was Fitz. We moved out after about a month and found a real house with more people. College, eh?

is this like bookmark thread

My friend did this for me once when I had a plumber that was taking too long to complete a job. I was away for a week and the guy said he would finish the project by the time I got back. My friend put a hair in the doorway to check if he'd been in to do any work and checked it a couple of times. When I came back he said he'd been in but the job was difficult and was taking a while. He was reminded that he hadn't been in at all that week.

"In one of the other stories told at the casino a husband had made sure of his misfortune by sticking a hair with a bit of wax as a seal on both his wife's door and her lover's." Le rouge et le noir, Stendhal, first pub.1830, tr.Margaret R. B. Shaw...

Stendhal is a realist, which I take to mean he didn't invent behaviour, he only recorded it = this idea was not new in 1830, and was an actual social and/or a device from earlier novels.

i think it was in lacarre's a perfect spy where the protagonist does something equivalent on his desk, where the seemingly haphazard arrangement of objects is intentional -- scissor blades deliberately pointed at other objects on the desk, etc

Winston Smith does this in 1984 iirc - but the spooks reading his secret journal replace everything back exactly as it was, even the motes of dust.

A couple I know had the wife's elderly mother living in the "granny flat" next door with an internal door between the two houses upstairs. They suspected she came in and looked through their stuff while they were out, so the husband, who was a bit of a mad inventor type, fitted a counter to the door to see how many times it had been opened.

After going out for the day, they came home and went to see if it said 0 or 1 or perhaps 2 and found that the number was over 100.

that's kind of sad

Should have set up a tollbooth.