Someone broke into a New Jersey couple's home, but nothing was stolen. Instead, their house was cleaned

My house is a mess. I’d pay the guy to show up, regardless.

If he could fix the vacuum hose (last housekeeper caused a short) and beater attachment, and toss in some hepa filters and new bags, I’d pay some more. He could even play with my cats.

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Yeah, the vast majority of homes are super susceptible to a quick window-smashing and grabbing of any exposed valuables before the police would be able to respond, and even the most secure homes with barred windows and reinforced doors are usually vulnerable to being quickly cut into with a battery powered saw. It’s really not very hard for a determined person to knock a hole in a wall.

One thing that’s kinda nice, I guess, is that new TVs are typically so cheap and huge these days it’s usually not worth the trouble to try to steal one. And what else are thieves going to steal in a typical home? Most people don’t have a lot of expensive jewelry or keep a lot of cash at home these days. PlayStations are still worth stealing, maybe?

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Instead, whoever broke in thoroughly cleaned the house. And fed their two cats.

Sounds like something their conspiring parents would do. ‘Those two live like pigs!’

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Q: “Did they take anything valuable?”
A: “Are you kidding? They totally cleaned us out!”

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I immediately thought “Chungking Express”

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I remember a funny little booklet for American tourists about learning German. Humorous illustrations. Short phrases. As is the case with most travel phrasebooks, the thing was organized by chapters (At the Train Station, At the Airport, At the Hotel, At the Restaurant, etc.).

The chapter “At the Hotel” had maybe two dozens handy phrases in German, with a picture, each followed by the English translation, thusly:

(cartoon of two “Americans” looking stunned)
“Unsere Sachen wurden gestohlen!”
(“Our things have been stolen!”)

(same cartoon of two “Americans” looking stunned)
“Unsere Sachen sind gewaschen!”
(“Our things have been washed!”)

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It’s important that isn’t too easy to enter on them. Having to use a key to open a door is a blocking function. Is useful to not enter in the wrong house, stopping kids to enter the wrong house and so on.
Fun fact: I had just bought a new car, that was one in the dealer parking lot, and got to buy groceries at a mall nearby, back at the car the remote wasn’t working and neither the keys. The plate was correct, except for two numbers. Probably they sold another car in the parking lot with same paint and same rims to another person. So it’s easy to enter in the wrong proerty if there aren’t blocking functions,.

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Someone keeps breaking in to my house and scattering dust all over the place. :disappointed:

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Perhaps this guy?

hey louis – i live in NY and if you are available, the key is under the mat. TIA.

we got a used piano from a friend of the family that works for a guy who gets free pianos off craigs list and then fixes them and sells them. He got us the piano for free and we just paid the company they use to move it. Guy delivers the piano and it doesn’t match the picture of the piano our friend sent us, so i call and they delivered the wrong piano. while we were waiting for this mess to get straightened out the piano delivery guys told us some crazy stories…one was when they were delivering a grand piano to some address and they missed the “west” in the street address part so delivered it to the wrong house…same deal, key under the mat, moved it in, set it up, left his business card on the bench.
a few hours later they got the call from a very confused person that now had a piano in their living room!

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This being NJ …
“That’s a nice place you got here. Shame if something happened to it.”
“Like what?”
“Who knows? Hey Joe, what happened to that house on 5th the other day? Oh yeah. It was sanitized! Even took care of the cats.”

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Happy mistakes where everybody is being positive, nice to see.

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Animated GIF

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Laptops and tablets are also still very common household items.

True. I’ve got a couple beat up old chromebooks, an ancient MacBook, and cracked iPad2 at my house so I guess I wasn’t really thinking about that.

I had a surprise cleaning done on my house when my kid was born. My family thought they were being helpful by coming in and doing a deep clean on our house while we were at the hospital. The sense of violation stuck with me for years. I can only imagine that a stranger would amplify that massively.

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And it was in A Chorus Line:

“That’s when I started breaking into people’s houses. Oh, I didn’t steal anything. I’d just re-arrange their furniture.”

holy smoley

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I wanted to do that many times at my late parents’ apartment. Toward the end of their lives they turned into terrible hoarders. But it was my discomfort, not theirs. Besides, it would have been an Augean task, and I was not up to it.

Nothing was stolen? Then how do they account for such a huge reduction in localized entropy?

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