Eleven o'clock in the morning. Not midnight, not three a.m. after a long night out - eleven in the morning, in the middle of a working day. At that hour, according to police suspicions, 32-year-old K.V. from Tetovo walked into a casino in the city, pulled out a knife and attempted a robbery.

When they brought him in and breathalysed him, the device read 2.49 per mille of alcohol in his blood.

Sit with that number for a second. 2.49 per mille is not „he'd had a few”. That is the level at which the average person struggles to stand upright and struggles even harder to remember what he's doing. And he was in that state - at eleven in the morning.

The incident happened on 15 July. The suspect is being held at a police station, and once the case is fully documented an appropriate criminal complaint for attempted robbery will be filed against him. The Interior Ministry announced that the knife was found on him during a search.

The story is easy to laugh at, and that is exactly why it's worth not laughing all the way through. A man who racked up 2.49 per mille before lunchtime and decided his plan was a knife and a casino isn't the punchline of a joke - he's a man who walked past somebody who could have noticed a long time ago. The question nobody will ask at a press conference: how many like him are out there who simply haven't walked into a casino yet?

The police did their job in ten minutes. The rest is somebody else's job - and that one usually doesn't get done.