When TikToker @maedyourday was in fifth grade, she lined the inside of her backpack with thumbtacks to try to prevent a classroom snack thief from stealing her snacks.
She attended a small private school, and there were around 20 kids in her class. Every day, she would put her backpack in her cubby, sit at her desk, and go about her day like normal. They always had snack time right before recess.
One day, she unzipped the front pocket of her backpack to find no snack waiting for her. She checked her backpack for holes and searched the classroom, thinking her snack might have fallen out. But it was nowhere in sight.
Later that day, she asked her mom if she had forgotten to pack a snack. Her mom said she didn’t think so. Her snack kept going missing for the next few days. She had watched her mom pack it in the morning, so someone at school must have been stealing it.
After three days, she told her mom that someone was stealing her snacks out of her backpack. Her mom suggested that she bring up the issue with her teacher.
However, the teacher simply told her to keep an eye on her backpack. The theft continued happening, so her parents advised her to write a note and put it in her backpack.
She wrote the phrase, “You steal my snack, you die!!!” in the note. She wanted to make her point very clearly. She placed the note right on top of the snack. But the next day, both the note and the snack had disappeared at snack time.
She was enraged and vowed to do whatever it took to prevent her snack from getting stolen. Her mom always packed junk food for her, and she was really upset that she was missing out on good snacks.
She and her friend devised a scheme to have one of them keep watch at all times. She also tried putting her snack in different pockets of her backpack, but the thief found it every time.
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The breaking point came for her after the snack thief swiped the cookies her mom had baked. That day, after school, she returned home and lined the inside of her backpack with thumbtacks. She hoped to cause injury to the thief when they reached into the backpack commit their crime.
The next morning at school, she set her trap and waited. At snack time, she checked her backpack. The snack was gone. At this point, she finally went back to her teacher and told her that she hadn’t eaten a snack in two weeks.
The teacher gathered the class together and gave a speech to everyone. She started talking about how wrong it was to steal, and whoever was doing it would get in big trouble if they didn’t stop.
“I was terrified of my teacher; I thought this would work,” said @maedyourday. “It didn’t. She just kept stealing and stealing until I was on the brink of insanity. One day, I went home and filled up a Ziploc bag with my dog’s food.”
The next day, the baggie of dog food disappeared. She thought the nasty snack would deter the thief from stealing, but she was wrong. She figured the only thing left to do was to slip in Bible verses about stealing into her backpack every day to hopefully guilt the thief into stopping. That didn’t work.
She finally gave up and stopped bringing a snack altogether. One day, her friend was talking about the homemade sugar cookies with green frosting her mom had made. At snack time, the cookies were gone.
At recess, they spotted a girl whose mouth was stained green. They told the teacher that they had figured out who the snack thief was.
Soon after, the teacher called a meeting with this girl’s parents. It turned out that the girl was having stomach issues, and her doctor had told her to stop eating gluten. Her mom bought gluten-free snacks, but the girl didn’t like them, so she kept stealing @maedyourday’s snacks.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
