The $5 felon

There comes a point in time where you read about someone who did something so amazingly stupid and so patently obvious as a bad idea that you cannot help but wonder if it really happened. Take for instance this soon-to-be-felon who thought it would be really slick to pass off an iPod as something less expensive than a big pack of batteries:

Baldino was detained by Target security Wednesday after he purchased a $150 iPod with a bar-code label of $4.99.

Baldino, a freshman electrical-engineering student at the University of Colorado, told police that he made phony bar codes from real bar codes taken from inexpensive merchandise, then glued those bar codes on to big-ticket items at Target, according to the police report.

You don't suppose it ever occurred to this guy that even a ditsy cashier, the type that he allegedly sought out, would kinda scratch her head when she saw an iPod getting marked down to a mere $4.99? There are only three types of people that would allow that to slip past them: those who don't care, those who are too busy to notice or those who are part of the scheme to rip off Target. You have to believe that a stereotype blonde cashier is dumber than a box of bricks to actually think that she'd see an item that normally retails for a few hundred dollars being sold for $4.99 and not get suspicious. Now I leave it with these two excerpts from the bottom, to show what kind of mind you have to have to actually think that this was a smart idea in the first place. Be warned, chances are if you read these statements you will grow a little bit less sympathetic to the human condition.

"I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!"

Baldino could not be reached for comment Thursday. In a follow-up statement to police, he wrote: "I am extremely sad now, and I just want to go to bed," he wrote. "Please let me sleep in my own bed tonight."

I couldn't make that stuff up if I were trying...