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Extremely Offline Teen Broke into Sleeping Family's Home to Get Online

He apparently had run out of data.
Image via selimaksan/Getty

Sure, the internet is a dark and horrid place full of conspiracies and trolls and fucked-up Furbies that will haunt your dreams forever, but it's also, like, super sick, too. How else would we get to see Timothée Chalamet photoshopped into every famous painting ever? Last weekend, a teenager, who we can only assume was desperate to surf the digital waters of the World Wide Web, decided to take drastic measures to get himself online—by breaking into a family's home in the middle of the night and begging them for their WiFi password.

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According to the Sacramento Bee, the 17-year-old suspect sliced his way into a Palo Alto home through a window screen around 12 AM Sunday night, while an unsuspecting couple slept inside. But the unnamed teen's quest for a sweet, sweet connection hit a snag when he discovered that the home's WiFi was protected, so he decided to just wake the sleeping couple and ask for the password. Unsurprisingly, this didn't exactly go over well.

The 60-something resident told police that he awoke to find the kid leaning over him, asking for the WiFi, and promptly leapt out of bed to confront him. The man then reportedly shoved the extremely offline teen out of the room and down the hall, continuing to push the boy backward until he had stumbled back outside the house and onto the lawn. Then he called the cops.

According to another woman in the neighborhood, the same teen had reportedly already come knocking at her window 15 minutes before his alleged break-in, telling her that his data had run out and asking if he could hop onto her WiFi network. When she said no, he apparently decided to pursue more nefarious means of getting online.

Police arrested the teen later that night in the same neighborhood, riding a bike that later turned out to be stolen. It's unclear what exactly the teen wanted to do online or why he felt it was so important that it required him to turn to a life of crime, but hopefully, someone gave him the WiFi password down at the police precinct so he could finally check his finsta or whatever.

The 17-year-old is now facing charges of prowling and felony residential burglary, but as dumb as busting into a house in search of WiFi may sound, it still isn't the dumbest thing people have done for the sake of the internet.

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