Cone thieves are hated at kickons. Road cone thieves, however, are beloved when they walk through the door with the orange wizard’s hat in their arms.
Authorities, on the other hand, hate those stealing their equipment, a problem running rampant in Dunnerz at the moment. With the city’s council spending $40,000 a year on road cones, as reported by The Critic, people want answers. And one thief provided them.
One thief shared with Breakfast that stealing the cones started as a way to obtain a binge-drinking vessel, but soon found the full, even selfish, extent of the road cone's utility.
“There’s a myriad of reasons I’ve been stealing road cones,” they said. “It began a few years ago just to steal them for, y’know, chucking our drinks in and skulling our drinks out of.”
“But in recent years I’ve been rearranging the streets down in Dunedin - changing the flow of traffic from crowded areas. Most recently, it’s come to my attention that I can put road cones out on my favourite car park, and have my own VIP section,” he said, wearing a ski mask and glasses while anonymizing his voice with a distorter.
Our uncaptured cone-vict sees his antics as an assistance to authority and also to the citizens of Dunedin.
"To be honest I’d say we’re doing the council a favour. There are so many cones on the road at the moment, trucks knocking them over. It’s actually a danger to people."
“You go out there and you pass by a cone and it’s an unsung rule - I might as well just grab one, or ‘that’s a really high tree, I wonder if I can get it up there’, you know?”
At the end of his interview, a more human side comes from the anonymous crook, with words of regret leaving his mouth.
“Looking back on everything I’ve done, the cones I’ve taken and rearranged, I think it probably isn’t my best moment. But you know, it is what it is.”
Road cones have long been a trophy the drunken traveller can return to their abode, but with more publicity falling upon those responsible, how much longer can they be obtained? The end of an era may be upon us.
