"Fortunately, You're Not Very Good At This" - Man Given No Jail Time After Robbing 6 Banks And Getting $500 Total

Some stories are funny, some stories are viral, some stories provoke outrage, some hit you right in the feels…and some are just good solid life lessons for the kids.  Like the story of Terence Cole, affectionately known as “the World’s Worst Bank Robber”:

“Fortunately, you’re not very good at this,” Judge Clement Goldstone QC told Cole in court, according to the UK’s Mirror. “I make it quite clear that if you had been more successful you would have been facing today a discretionary life sentence.”

Between Nov. 23 and Dec. 3 of last year, Cole attempted to rob six banks, but left empty-handed every time except once, the news outlet reported. [NY POST]

Everyone out there who hasn’t hit adult life yet, who is reading this in their high school classroom or college lecture hall, wondering what their next step is after graduation: remember Terence Cole.  Take some of that pressure off yourself.  There’s no need to aspire to be super successful or super talented – sometimes, it pays to just be really bad at your job.

During the attempted heists, Cole wore a scarf over his mouth and muffled his voice so much that bank tellers could not even hear his demands for cash.

Cole also claimed to have a gun during the attempted stick-ups, but the “gun” was actually a gray brush wrapped in tape.

On one occasion, bank staffers realized the weapon was a fake and refused to fork over cash with one worker telling Cole to “sod off,” the court heard.

Don’t get me wrong, you don’t want to be TOTALLY incompetent – it’s important to have at least a couple of successes.

During his only successful robbery out of the six, Cole made off with nearly $500 bucks from a Royal Bank of Scotland in Merseyside and left a clerk “crying hysterically,” according to the news outlet.

Or maybe only one, whatever.  Point is that even if you end up being a total failure with no discernible skills, if you keep an optimistic attitude, you can turn that failure INTO a skill – avoiding prison showers and 23-1 days in a tiny, dark, dirty dank cell.

And, a bonus lesson, don’t follow Marty Mush.

After Cole was arrested he told cops that he would have continued trying to rob banks to pay off his $2,600 gambling debts.

(via The New York Post)