How many times have you seen this scenario on television or in the movies? A private detective/nosy neighbor/group of meddling kids needs to get into a penthouse apartment/detached garage/office of a bankrupt amusement park owner but when he/she/they try the door it’s locked. Instead of giving up and letting the case/gossip/mystery go uninvestigated a credit card is confidently pulled from a wallet and inserted into the space between the door frame and lock. A wiggle, a jiggle, and "click" the door pops open.
Hollywood makes the art of picking a lock with a plastic laminated card look so easy, but tell that to the Blockbuster Video Card I mangled unsuccessfully trying to retrieve my filched stapler from the locked office of my company nemesis. Is there anyone out there excluding members of the Screen Actors Guild who can actually jimmy a door open with a credit card; anyone besides children from New Jersey I mean?
On Christmas Eve in South Brunswick, NJ a 9-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy used a gift card to pick the lock on the back door of a home and made off with around $200 of gifts; including Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers CDs. My 5-year old has been known to get trapped in bathrooms where the locks are on the inside, so I’m left to wonder where these Kinder-Garden Staters learned this lock picking technique. My guess is that it must part of the educational curriculum included in the same unit they teach how to have an uncompromising love of Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, cool terms like Bennies and Shoobies to insult out-of-staters and how to answer the question, “What town do you live in?” with an exit off the Parkway.
The rapscallions were only caught when one of their relatives for some reason spoke to the burglarized couple and discovered the stolen items matched the unexplained presents the children had received on Christmas. Maybe it’s just me but unexplained gifts on Christmas morning would be reason enough for me to start asking a few questions.
“Did you buy the Jonas Brothers CD?”
“No, I thought you did!”
“Me? Who the Hell are the Jonas Brothers? Hold on…where’s my wallet? Alright, something’s not right about this. You call the police and I’ll go randomly talk to neighbors.”
The gifts were returned to the couple and no charges are going to be filed against Bonnie and Cried, but an ironic detail of the case was that the amount on the gift card the kids used to pick the lock was equal to the estimated value of the gifts they stole. Not really, but that's the way it would have played out if Hollywood had anything to do with it.
