Revenge is sweet. But Mark Rober's glitter bomb trap for package thieves proves it can be a bit messy, too.
Rober is clearly a smart guy; a former NASA engineer, he worked on the Mars Curiosity rover.
But for anyone who's gotten a package stolen off a doorstep, he's now a hero.
"Something needs to be done to take a stance against dishonest punks like this," Rober said in a now-viral YouTube video.
After having a package stolen from his doorstep, Rober decided to use his engineering background to serve up some retribution on would-be thieves.
"If anyone was going to make a revenge bait package and over-engineer the crap out of it, it was going to be me," he said.
The package would contain a pound of fine glitter plus some potent fart spray. The glitter would burst out when opened; the latter would spray five times, every 30 seconds.
But Robert went one step further -- including four phones recording the thieves' reactions. A GPS tracker in the phones would let him know where a package ultimately ended up.
If he couldn't recover the package, the video would at least automatically upload to the cloud.
Once completed, he slapped a packing label addressed from the "Home Alone" character Kevin McCallister to movie villains Harry and Marv -- a nice, figurative bow on the present.
Then Rober just needed to wait and let the package rain pain.
In the YouTube video, some "victims" opened packages in their cars, with glitter being tossed into every nook and cranny. Others opened packages in their houses; one even was even filmed trying to vacuum the mess up.
Still, package thieves remain a problem; click
here
for some tips on how to prevent package theft.
