When I first heard about the “free money glitch” that was trending, I had questions. The first was, “How’s that working out?” And it turns out that the answer is, “Not well.” My next question was, “Is TikTok somehow involved?” And you could probably guess the answer.

A trend on TikTok shows people going to ATMs to take advantage of a “glitch” that lets them withdraw arbitrarily large sums of cash, and then showing themselves reveling over handfuls of squishy money.

I’m not going to share how it’s done, partly because I don’t want to catch the ire of the financial institution involved. Picking a fight with teams of billionaires is usually not a great idea, as a bunch of TikTokers are starting to find out.

While it’s sad enough that people are uploading videos of themselves committing check fraud to social media, having no idea what could possibly go wrong, it’s sadder still that enough people are falling for this to line up around city blocks for their turn to do the same.

You could probably guess what comes next. The same people ended up with their bank accounts frozen, with negative balances in the tens of thousands of dollars. And possibly also face arrest, because, you know, check fraud.

If you’re wondering whether so many people could be so stupid, then you probably never worked retail. When you work retail, you’re going to see upwards of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people in a day.

As for me, ten years of my life went to waste on that bullshit, which is ten years too many. Afterwards, I went to school for Electronics, reasoning that if something is difficult to learn, the payoff must be great. So, I really applied myself and studied hard, and as most other students in my major dropped out or switched to something else, I got great grades and eventually graduated with honors. After that, I spent about a year in an electronics repair job where I made a dollar more per hour than someone stocking shelves at a nearby grocery store. I did get out of that place, but I was there long enough to see some circuit boards come back for repair again, because the customers did the same thing with it that they did before.

So, at that point, I still hadn’t quite managed to completely get away from stupid people. And I learned a sobering lesson about correlating effort and hard work to better outcomes.

But yeah, stupid people exist. And if you’ve worked retail, the memories of them that you haven’t successfully suppressed will be quite vivid. Sure, most people will be completely ordinary, and therefore, not memorable. However, 10% of the population are on the leftmost 10% of the area of the bell curve, and your experience with them might stick with you.

I still remember the guy who wasted ten minutes of time I could’ve spent on something else searching for some mystery product that he insisted that we regularly stocked. Eventually, I found out that he wanted onion rolls, except he was pronouncing “onion” in his own bullshit way, and I didn’t find out until he finally said “onion” normally. No, he didn’t end up getting jackslapped, because it just wasn’t worth it.

Or the one who was on a program that required her to only redeem her voucher for specific products of a specific size, but she tried redeeming for a box of breakfast cereal that was the wrong size. After finding out this wouldn’t work, she just threw the box down the cereal aisle. The program that gave her the voucher was intended to assist single women with children, so I had to contemplate that someone like her procreated.

There’s more, but I’ll just get to the point: stupid people exist, and they exist in great numbers. If you can avoid working with the general public for a living, then you’re going to be happier than people who do.

It’s no surprise to me that there are enough stupid people out there to line up around a city block to get what they believe to be free money from an ATM, entirely unaware of the crime that they’re committing, and that they’d be expected to pay back the money that they’d steal.

They’re no longer my problem, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t laugh when they do stupid shit, and face the obvious consequences.

I’ll leave this with some food for thought: Much of the internet is tricking people into doing things. Also, TikTok is corrosive bullshit.