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The Coachella festival, held in the godforsaken Indio desert in Southern California, is not a fun place unless you’re drunk and/or rolling hard on some bath salts. I’ve never been, but I am very, very certain that is a true statement. Just hearing that someone is going to Coachella now has given me free reign in hating them. You only go to Coachella for the ‘gram, man. Don’t act like it’s still all about the music. Be straight with me and admit you’re paying over a grand in travel, hotel, and alcohol fees to take a picture of yourself in gladiator sandals in front of a ferris wheel. I’ll at least give you points for your honesty, except no I won’t, because you’re still an idiot.
Seeing as every single person attending Coachella has their phone out over 90% of the time to film themselves dancing to a song they’re pretending to know the words to as a fedora slips over their eyes, it makes a great deal of sense to me that these folks are easy prey for pickpocketers. People who go to Coachella usually have money, especially if they’re coming from out of state, so slipping a credit card out of the back pocket of a pair of high-waisted shorts seems like an easy move. One hero took the idea a step further, and decided he was going to hit festival-goers where it hurt most: right in their iPhones.
There is nothing more terrifying than setting your iPhone down to order another $14 watered-down rum runner only to find that it’s not on the grass where you’re sure you flung it. I can empathize with that level of panic. When you’re so drunk and so high that you’re starting to see sounds, attempting to find a lost iPhone is enough to push your poor overworked heart right into cardiac arrest. Our phones now hold our credit card information, passwords to every social media site we’re on, all of our friends’ phone numbers, and those photos of you near the stage that you were waiting to put on the gram until evening. Our main guy, a Mr. Reinaldo De Jesus Henao, did not give a shit about that fact.
Henao is being charged with the theft of over one hundred iPhones during the first weekend of Coachella. In reality, he probably only got caught because he got too greedy. Take the first thirty iPhones you can steal and bounce next time, dude. You flew too close to the sun. Your greed was your own downfall. That, and the millennials who all used their friends’s iPhones to track theirs and found you that way. It would probably be pretty time-consuming to power down a hundred iPhones, though, so I can’t blame Henao for wanting to just book it out of there with what I have to imagine must have been a really, really heavy backpack.
To help such an event from happening again, local police laid out guidelines to help Coachella-attendees from getting all their shit stolen. One suggestion was to store your important stuff in more than one place, which I’m calling the dumbest idea of all time. Sure, if you keep your credit card and passport in separate places one might not get stolen, but there is no way that a twenty-two-year-old rolling on Molly and two hours of sleep is going to remember the six places he stashed his shit when he was seeing the giant mushrooms dance. Everyone’s brain capacity at that place is being taken up by drugs, alcohol, and intense dehydration, coupled with a potential total hearing loss from the screaming of all the other “music fans.” You’re better off sticking everything into your purse, latching that shit onto you, and praying it’s all there in the morning.
For the unlucky suckers who lost their phones thanks to our friend Reinaldo, they can be picked up at the Coachella lost and found. (God only knows what else is in that pile.) Next time, maybe they’ll remember to keep the iPhone in the fanny pack where it belongs. .
[via Complex]
Image via Instagram
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Rory Gilmore
Rory Gilmore on the outside. Emily Gilmore on the inside. Email me funny shit at rory_gilmore20@yahoo.com.
@rory_gilmore20
Man just imagine if he had been able to sell all of those iPhones, he might’ve covered the cost of going to coachella
Solution to festival theft: get a fanny pack. It’s quite comforting having your phone, wallet gum and joints in a secured pouch above your junk where nobody would be foolish enough to steal it
Name checks out, I know what’s in your fanny pack.