20th Century Studios
Over the course of his career, Mike Judge has quietly but firmly cemented himself as one of the most brilliant comedic minds of his generation. The man who burst onto the scene with Beavis and Butt-Head was also the creative mind behind King of the Hill, Silicon Valley, and the increasingly prophetic Idiocracy, but I’d argue his magnum opus is 1999’s Office Space.
For the uninitiated, Office Space largely revolves around a trio of white-collar workers stuck in menial jobs at Initech, a company where consultants have been hired to handle some downsizing. After discovering two of them are on the verge of losing their jobs, they hatch a plan to whip up a code to siphon tiny sums of money related to routine transactions into a bank account to slowly but surely rack up a fairly hefty balance.
The crew sees things go awry thanks to a programming error, but are able to avoid being found out thanks to Milton, the socially awkward co-worker who conveniently follows through on his threats to light the company’s building on fire and subsequently destroys the evidence of the crime.
While they may have gotten away with it, the same can’t be said for one man who reportedly drew some inspiration from the film to commit the crimes he was recently arrested for.
According to KOMO, Ermenildo Castro was recently charged with stealing around $300,000 from the online retailer Zully after his former employer allegedly discovered he’d been pocketing shipping fees into a personal account (prosecutors say the software engineer used that method to take home $240,000 while also changing prices on the website to buy more than $40,000 worth of goods at a substantially reduced cost).
The police report states Castro told investigators he’d drawn inspiration for the scheme from Office Space (which, as astute viewers know, actually drew its inspiration for that particular subplot from Superman III).
Law enforcement officials also discovered around 1,000 items they say Castro fraudulently purchased from Zully at his home but failed to specify if one of them was a copying machine that had been smashed to smithereens with a baseball bat.
