You go home, you have a great Christmas, you come back and some arseholes have stolen your Mac that you put in a cupboard to prevent yourself from working over the festive period. Or they've taken that priceless ring that’s been in your family for 30,000 years. Or just all of your stuff.
But how do you prevent this from happening? Well, a new study from the University of Portsmouth have basically nailed where you should hide your valuables to prevent them being found by burglars and hint: it involves sticking your mac in the shower. Or somewhere weird.
Tests done by the university looked at how burglars searched houses for the good shit, and found they went room by room in a systematic way: half headed for the upstairs bedrooms first, avoiding bathrooms then coming downstairs. ‘The findings have important lessons for crime prevention and suggest that if you’ve got something valuable you really want to protect, you might be better off hiding small things among the toothpaste tubes,’ says Dr. Clare Nee who helped run the experiment.
Bathrooms were often ignored by burglars, and while the novices broke through the front door, the experienced thieves came in through the back. So another top tip: don’t leave anything expensive near your doors, either.
Possibles: expensive jewellery in the pots where you keep your toothbrushes, your mac behind the sink, your secret stash of cash inside cereal boxes, and anything else underneath sofa cushions. What burglar removes sofa cushions?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.