Apparently Catch Me If You Can was going to include this con but they had to cancel the scene because when they tried to film it people kept walking up and trying to give Leo their money.
So a professor of mine used to work at a bank back in the day. She says one day a guy in professional attire and a clipboard shows up in a big moving truck. He says he’s from the home office and they’re changing all the chairs. He’s needs them to just load all their old chairs into his truck and later he’d be back with the replacements.
And that’s how they gave away their office furniture to a conman whose master plan was “Wear a tie and carry a clipboard.”
Looking professional is just a pass to do whatever the hell you want.
Put a suit on and you can get almost anywhere.
there’s more to it, look nice and ACT LIKE YOU BELONG. If you don’t look like you belong there, people will stop you.
this smacks of a chef i heard of that was tired to death that every single person ordered their eggs ‘over easy’, so asked the waitress to say ‘were out of over easy, we have plenty of scrambled’ and nobody questioned it
How low must your self image be to plan to rob a bank and all you take is some second hand chairs?
I 100% believe this was a former employee with a grudge.
Kid you not, this is how a sister store of mine got their entire dog treat bar stolen.
A couple of guys said they were with maintenance and they were there to replace the old bar with a new one and the employees were like “Seems legit” and they wheeled them out. The staff even helped them do it.
This is called a “Bavarian Fire Drill” and the trick to pulling it off is to have absolute confidence that it’s going to work. If you seem even the slightest bit nervous or hesitant, everyone will see right through it.
Case in point:
In 1906, a German con man named Wilhelm Voigt dressed up in a German Army captain’s uniform and entered the town of Köpenick claiming to be an “inspector” (inspector of what, he never specified). He managed to wrangle ten German soldiers and a sergeant into assisting him, ordered the local police to halt all telephone calls to Berlin for an hour, arrested the mayor and treasurer for nonexistent charges of crooked bookkeeping, and confiscated the town’s entire treasury complete with a receipt which he signed with his former jail director’s name. He only got caught (two weeks later) because his former cellmate blabbed, and was later pardoned by Kaiser Wilhelm II who found the whole thing hilarious.
That Kaiser is a definite bro.
This is why slytherins like to be fancy and professional looking
When you’re a trickster, it pays to be … low key.
I was hired to help test a security system once. I was sent in to a semi-large company and had to go through a list of certain objectives. My favorite one was “take something out of the building that is too big to hide on your body.“ I paired it with “get into a secured facility within the building.”
I walked in in my general business getup. Shirt, tie, jacket, nice pants, not quite “suit” because it was all just a little bit shabby and not exactly matching but not clashing. Nice briefcase. Clipboard.
Getting into the secured part was easy. Learned the name of the supervisor, told the security guard that “Cindy said they’d let me in without a problem on my first day. Something about the badges not being made fast enough.” Sure, no problem, go ahead.
Walked in, unhooked a PC tower, walked to the bathroom where I’d hidden a dolly earlier, went into a stall and changed into the outfit I’d had in the briefcase. It was what I’d consider workman’s clothes but a worker in an office, not like a construction worker.
Blue jeans, t-shirt, worker’s vest (low key), hat, good boots but 2nd hand.
Threw the tower on the mover’s dolly with a couple other things, stacked very slightly precariously but not likely to fall, walked over to the stairs leading down, and started going down to the way out, which I knew had a security guard on it.
As soon as I saw him see me I stumbled and yelled out. He came running over and helped stabilize everything. Helped me down the stairs. Held the door open for me and told me to “have a nice day” as I left. Never asked for my badge or even where I was going with the stuff.
Act like you know what you’re doing. Look like you belong. Be confident.
That’s 75% of it right there.
That is some Moist Von Lipwig bullshit right there and I am fucking delighted.
Headcanon: I can muster a cogent argument for why it would make more sense or make for a better story if this were the case
Heartcanon: I don’t have a particular rationale for why this ought to be the case, I just like to imagine it’s true because it gives me the warm fuzzies
Gutcanon: it’s not that I actively want this to be the case – it just unaccountably feels like it should be
Junkcanon: I like to imagine it’s true because it gives me the other kind of warm fuzzies
Spleencanon: I insist that this is the case specifically to spite the author, because, like, fuck you, sir or madam
My mom just told me you’re not a woman until you get blood on nearly every pair of pants you love. I was like, “what if you don’t have periods?” And she said “I didn’t say it had to be your own.”
I thought this was going to be cissexist and I was pleasantly surprised.
i really love our generation’s joke trend of like, very calm but incredibly inflated hyperbole. like nobody says “oh she’s pretty” anymore we say “i would willingly let her murder me” and everyone is just like “lol same”
i think “same” is also great and “me,” i love when somebody reblogs a picture of like, a lizard, and just says “me” and we all know exactly what they mean. the current online Humor Discourse is remarkable because we trade exclusively in metaphors and implications and nobody ever, ever says anything outright and yet EVERYBODY understands each other perfectly
This reminds me of the time when I was on vacation with my family and we were hiking, and after using a rest stop, the conversation turned to the grossness of outhouses and port-a-potties, and I said that if I ever got splashback from a port-a-potty, “my soul would depart my body.” My parents found that hilarious, and my dad commented that my generation can be so clever with words bc he would only think to say something like “It would be disgusting” which doesn’t convey the sentiment nearly as well as “my soul would depart my body.”
I find this so intriguing because it opens up so many possibilities for future writers to connect with their readers.
Does that mean we’re literally “Darmok and Jalad”-ing language? We speak in stories and references and memes, never saying what’s actually going on, just making reference to other things.
The dudes from mythbusters are the ultimate unstoppable force vs immovable object,, every time they interact its just
immovable object is an amazing description for a person who once said “I don’t think our death ray is working. I’m standing right in it, and I’m not dead yet.”
Steel Phoenix Studios 