Dudley likes to spend his leisure hours watching cable television. His favorites are cops and robbers shows. He marvels at how clever some of the crooks are, but somehow, Dudley fails to notice that most of the time the crooks end up in jail.

One show Dudley enjoys features a crook who gains entry into homes using a plastic credit card to pry the door lock open.

One night when television seems especially dull and Dudley has lots of free time, he decides to try his hand at burglary — as learned on his favorite TV channel.

Dudley could drive to a nearby town to ply his new trade, or even go to another neighborhood. But Dudley is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Instead, he walks over to his next door neighbor’s house.

Dudley reaches into his wallet and slips out one of his own credit cards. Then he slides the plastic card between the door and the door jamb. The lock is stubborn and does not respond immediately to Dudley’s newfound burglary skills.

He wiggles the card a bit, as if to encourage the credit card to do its job properly. The credit card responds instead with a "snap." That is the sound of Dudley’s credit card breaking in half.

At that moment a light flips on in the house. Dudley’s fiddling with the lock mechanism has awakened the household. Dudley withdraws his credit card — half of it — and runs off into the cover of darkness.

Mr. Zimmerman, the householder, opens the front door to see what the noise is all about. Half of a credit card falls to the threshold. It’s the half with Dudley’s name and magnetic strip which includes Dudley’s account information.

Detectives contact the credit card company. When cops arrive at Dudley’s house (next door) they see the other half of the credit card on the kitchen table. Sitting in an interrogation room at police headquarters, Dudley moans, "This isn’t at all like I thought it’d be."

It never is, Dudley, it never is.

Our thanks to Reuters news agency who first reported this story.