Hello there, I have some good news: 1) we are almost finished with this godforsaken year, and 2) a former NASA engineer has ~finally~ invented something that brings extremely sweet revenge for anyone who has ever had their packages and property stolen.
About seven months ago, the engineer, Mark Rober, noticed that Amazon had marked one of his orders as delivered, though he had never received the package. It turned out his surveillance camera had captured the bandit, but police told him that it "wasn't worth the time to look into" the crime.
Feeling violated and "powerless," Rober, who worked on NASA's Curiosity rover, among other impressive résumé items, decided to engineer some "vigilante justice" and create the ultimate revenge machine. He tinkered with and tested model after model until, after six months, he had completed his masterpiece. He then posted a video of the contraption on YouTube, where it quickly went viral, bringing satisfaction and fist-pumping joy to anyone who's ever had their stuff stolen.
Tucked into an unassuming white Apple HomePod cardboard box, the incredible package-thief-nailer not only captures the location and identity of the would-be package thief, but — in what Rober calls the pièce de résistance — it also sprays them and their surroundings with "the world's finest glitter" and an overwhelming fart scent.
Here it is in action:
And again in slo-mo because spinning glitter is oddly mesmerizing (thanks, centrifugal force):
A small, intricate circuit board acts as the "brains of the operation," Rober explained in his YouTube video. When jostled, a built-in accelerometer triggers a GPS system that tracks the package's location, and, simultaneously, four phones in wide-angle filming mode begin recording.
"I am guaranteed to capture their reaction," he said gleefully.
And capture them he does. In his 10-minute video, we see several would-be package thieves meander up to people's doorsteps and abscond with the white box.
One unsuspecting dude opens the package in his car and is greeted with a rain of rainbow glitter, prompting him to drop F-bombs like it's his job. The same thing happens to another guy, who squeals, "What's that smell?!" after the fart spray deploys.
"That shit stinks," the guy says, tossing the box into some shrubbery.
After stealing the contraption, a woman got the holiday surprise of a lifetime when a sea of glitter washed over her snowman-covered quilt.
If these porch bandits had looked closely enough, Rober laughed, they would have seen that the sender's name was Kevin McCallister — a reference to Macaulay Culkin's character in Home Alone.
"I even looked up and am using the address from the actual house they filmed the movie in and of course it's being shipped to his boys Harry and Marv," the engineer said in the video, referring to the movie's iconic villains. (This, Rober noted, was his "favorite part" of the whole revenge scheme.)
After the footage dropped, people across the world gave a resounding hard clap, calling the prank and ensuing footage extremely gratifying because everyone can empathize with and relate to the horrible feeling of someone stealing your stuff.