Anyone who’s played those “claw capture” games knows how frustrating they can be: All you want is that sweet, sweet stuffed animal, and the claw seems almost comically incapable of keeping its grasp on it. One Tennessee toddler decided he wasn’t going to take this sort of injustice lying down, and got himself stuck in one such vending machine at a laundromat in Maryville, Tennessee, WATE reports.

The child, 18-month-old Colin Lambert, was eventually released by fire and rescue staff. His grandmother, Diane O’Neill, snapped photos of the tyke while she waited for help to arrive.

“Nothing surprises me with him,” O’Neill told WATE. “You just have to expect the worst, and usually it happens.”

Firefighters were able to rescue the boy without incident. They handed him a stuffed toy from the machine, perhaps as a reward for in ingenuity and refusal to be held down by the man, for which he likely took the machine’s claw to be a metaphor.

Colin’s mother, understandably, is proud of the child, saying “it was only a matter of time before he did something like this.”

“He’s a sweet little monster, but he is a monster,” O’Neill sighed.

Neither Colin’s family nor authorities have yet to give word of his next planned adventure.