For more than 25 years, since going through one of the weirdest afternoons in my life, I have told this hilarious, hardly believable story from when I was 17. Through a series of coincidences, luck, and some foolishness, I somehow accidentally stole a car for a few hours and took it around my city, made multiple stops including to a couple of police stations and, most famously, a 7-11 for a slurpee run.
This story is so absurd that more than 20 years after it happened, not only did my retelling blow up on social media and reddit, it was covered by the CBC, the Daily Mail, and the Washington Post. These stories were then reprinted in dozens of papers around the world and even translated into (at least) ten languages. For a brief period of time, I was the most famous car thief in the world!
The ultimate treat however was seeing my story told as part of a (very) short joke on Weekend Update of Saturday Night Live!
Yes, really! Here’s Michael Che telling a joke about my remarkable story.
I am that “man in Canada”!
Watch the entire story as told by me. It’s worth a few minutes!
And no, I haven’t found her! So if you come across someone who thought their car was stolen from a swimming pool parking lot in Winnipeg in the summer of 1998, only to find it back in the exact same place the next day, send her my way!
