A lot of us do a lot of online shopping this time of year, which means a lot of packages sitting on doorsteps. If you've ever had a problem with packages being stolen off your porch, you'll want to check out this video. Mark Roper, who has worked for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, devised a way to get back at those package thieves by building a glitter bomb into a box. It's something right out of Home Alone, which even gets a little shout out as part of Roper's design. Check it out.
Mark Roper himself admits that his package bomb is overengineered, but that's sort of the beauty of the whole thing. It contains a spinning dish to distribute the glitter, a bottle of fart spray that goes off at regular intervals, and four smartphones that act as both GPS locators so the package can be retrieved, and video cameras to be able to record the entire experience. Because if you can't see the look on the perpetrator's face, what's the point?
And the cherry on top of the sundae is the Home Alone reference included in the thing. The fake package label that's been included shows that the box is being sent by Macauley Culkin's character, Kevin McCallister, and is being sent to Harry and Marv, who live on "Wet Bandit Way," according to the address. Clearly, nobody is looking at the thing too closely. Of course, after they get covered in glitter, they have other concerns.
Also, nobody would ship a product like a HomePad without an external box specifically to try and prevent theft. Criminals are dumb.
The glitter bomb is, in and of itself, a thing of absolute beauty. What's more, it works absolutely perfectly. We actually get to see it in action not just once but multiple times. Only once does the mechanism slightly falter, preventing us from watching what happens, but since the fart spray still goes off, the perp drops that thing fast.
A couple of times the box appears to end up in the trash outside the offender's house. It's unclear if this could be used as evidence against them since it seems the creator now knows specifically who stole from his porch.
One certainly assumes that Kevin McCallister would be proud. Even Home Alone didn't go quite this far with the traps. This would have only worked in the movie if Kevin had been an engineering student, which, now that I think about it, is a movie I would totally watch.
The only downside may be how depressing it is that this trick works so many times. There are clearly a lot of people who think stealing packages is cool. Hopefully, some of them were inspired to quit after this experience, and maybe potential thieves will be warned off now that they know that some people out there don't mind screwing with them.
