One of my guilty pleasures is reading My Life Is Average, a spinoff of FML. Take this one, for example:

This weekend, I put my fridge out on the street with a “Free” sign. No one wanted anything to do with it. Then on a whim I replaced the “Free” sign with a “$50″ sign. Next time I looked out on the street it was stolen. MLIA.

Oh, MLIA. You’re so much better than FML. The economics of this one are pretty simple. A “free” sign indicates that the refrigerator really worth anything, so no one’s willing to take it. The $50 sign says, ” hey, this thing is worth something. It’s worth stealing.” And with no security to protect it from being stolen, voila. It’s gone the next morning.

But let’s say you don’t want your things stolen. There are two ways of preventing this from happening.

1) Make it hard to steal. That’s what safes, locks, and armored trucks are for.

2) Decrease the incentive to steal. Make your stuff seem worthless.

One example comes from a site I also really enjoy reading, Lifehacker. Lifehacker is, in a nutshell, a quirky and nerdy site that’ll teach you clever uses for binder clips, point you to free downloads and applications to boost your productivity, and give you pointers, tips, and shortcuts to making life more efficient and cheaper — all with a hint of McGuyver (turning binder clips and rubber bands into a cool pencil holder, for example). One of their tips is a great example of signaling: The uglified camera.

What a great example. An uglified camera makes it look, besides aesthetically unpleasing, that it wasn’t very well cared for. It gives the impression that the owner didn’t really care for the camera, and therefore it’s not worth a whole lot. Maybe worthless enough that it really isn’t worth stealing.

Is this the best defense against protecting your camera? Of course not. Method 1 is. Keep your camera in your pocket. Uglifying your camera can help if you accidentally misplace it, but there is of course no substitute for security. But sometimes security isn’t always there.

Here at Georgetown, for example, there’s one kitchen for every floor of the freshman dorm. In each kitchen there’s a communal refrigerator/freezer. No one has a freezer in their own room (due to university restrictions on what can be kept in your room), so most frozen foods are kept in the communal freezer.

One day, I saw a sign taped to the freezer door that said something along the lines of:

To whoever took my ice cream, my mother spent $10 on that at Whole Foods to get it for me because she knows I like it. That meant a lot to me and I hope you will have the heart to go to my room and reimburse me for it. — [Room number]

I doubt whoever took the ice cream was the kind of person to go back and give the poor girl $10. The kind of person to take ice cream is not the kind of person to do that sort of thing. But I’m willing to bet the girl just put the ice cream in the freezer without a little thought to how to stop people from stealing it. This is the situation in which the first method — security — of preventing theft is not available.

I would have put the ice cream in a paper bag. Paper bags in the freezer are inherently less attractive than tubs of ice cream. But people can be curious, and someone looking to steal something will most definitely look inside the paper bag. So I would label it something, something to make the would-be thief think it’s something unappetizing. “Preston’s ground beef.” Most would-be thieves aren’t looking to steal ground beef, and probably aren’t willing to look inside when there are other parts of the refrigerator to explore.

This isn’t a guarantee. Ice cream in the common room is pretty risky. A smart thief will think to look inside. But it’s better than just leaving it in the freezer for all to see.

So I gave a little thought to how I would store something in the communal fridge. I’d just bought some squid and managed to harvest the ink after cooking the rings. Squid ink, for anyone who knows how to cook, is extremely valuable and makes for a great meal.

Usually someone would label their food and say “do not touch” in hopes that no one would steal it. But that only works if people are nice. If not, a post-it note that says “do not touch” really says, “This thing is worth stealing, worth it enough that I labeled it.” So instead of putting a note on my container of squid ink that said “Do not touch Preston’s squid ink,” I just let my tupperware container of squid ink sit, unmarked and unguarded, in the common room refrigerator. It drew no one’s attention and no one knew that something so valuable was inside.

Days later, I treated myself to some great squid ink ramen.

It's better than you think