I was reading this article about 2 dumb thieves who tried to return a printer to WalMart in which they left a sheet of paper with two counterfeit $100 bills printed on it, (yes, really!) and it brought me back to a similar incident in a store I managed years ago.

My janitor (yes, this was back in the day when companies actually paid to have a full-time janitor keeping the store clean) came up to me one day with a sheet he had found in our photocopier in the front of the store.  It looked something like this:

I said to him “That looks like someone was casing our store to break in, and made copies of the plans in our copy machine and actually left the original behind.”   I called the police and they agreed, and said there was nothing they could do and to have faith in our alarm system.   A few weeks later, the store was broken into at 2 AM.  The thieves broke in through the skylight in the back room, rappelled inside and then were free and clear in the store and could have pretty much taken anything they wanted over the next 3-4 hours.   Luckily, they attempted to break into the pharmacy and tripped the sonic alarm there and they then panicked and smashed the front door and took off,  basically empty-handed after all of their meticulous planning.  The only loss to the store was the cost of repairing the front door and the roof access hatch they initially tried to break in through.  The skylight now has bars and they were never caught but I’ll never forget the fact that they were dumb enough to leave the plans in our copier and either didn’t realize we’d find it or didn’t care.   Thieves are dumb.