Skills can pay the bills
EMPLOYERS typically look for many traits when interviewing potential hirees. There’s work ethic, honesty, and perhaps most important, skills. Does the applicant have the skills to do the job? All the punctuality in the world isn’t going to help a plumber plumb.
A recent bank theft in Hot Springs certainly featured some skills. The papers say a suspect used a forklift to rip an ATM off its foundation and put it in a truck. Then the thief drove the truck into the woods and used a compact excavator to pry the ATM open, taking the money inside.
Criminal aspects aside, that’s certainly an imaginative caper. The individual who performed this heist displayed a number of skills. First, there’s the ability to operate a forklift. That alone requires hours of training, testing and hands-on experience to get certification. It also would make the suspect valuable to a number of industrial employers.
The average forklift operator salary in this country is $13 per hour, according to Payscale.com. Officials say the ATM was valued at $8,000. If gainfully employed, it would have taken only a few months to earn that money—without any overtime or sign-on bonus. Plus, there’d have been no risk of going to prison.
Second, a U-Haul box truck was found in the woods with the ATM remnants. The suspect can clearly drive a truck, another marketable skill. And finally, there’s the use of an excavator to pry the ATM open. That requires classes and instruction from a community college or training facility and would make the suspect valuable in the construction industry. The average salary of a heavy equipment operator in the U.S. is $63,000, according to The Houston Chronicle. Working at that pay, the suspect could have made $8,000 in six weeks.
What this crime clearly shows is someone with valuable skills who could easily get a job in this low-unemployment economy instead chose to take the criminal path and steal a few thousand dollars from a bank. What a waste. And when the suspect is caught and imprisoned, what a cost to the rest of us.