Thievery

September 24th, 2007 by Potato

I am so incredibly fed up with stupid thieves. What possesses people to steal things from other people?

Perhaps just as important, I’m fed up with incompetent thieves. It makes absolutely no sense to me for someone to put me to all the emotional anguish of being broken into or stolen from, as well as the cost of repairs and actually taking my crap, when the thief gets next to nothing out of it. With my car, I had to pay for thousands of dollars of damage to it, and all the thieves got was a ride for a few hours and maybe $12 from the change in the ashtray, and a used poker set. The benefit to them was way out of proportion to the cost to me, so it’s not just theft, it’s retarded and spiteful.

So Wayfare was congratulating us today since we made it through a Sunday without going to the hospital while we drove back to London, and we got here to find the house was broken into. And broken into by what must have been the world’s most retarded thief. The guy must have been high and looking for drugs, or just out to piss me off and not actually steal anything.

They broke in through the basement window (which I’m 95% sure was locked), and then had to get from the basement to the rest of the house. We have a door at the top of the stairwell, and while there’s a bit of a trick to opening it, it wasn’t locked. So the thief grabs a giant concrete cinder block/brick and bashes the hell out of the unlocked door to get to the rest of the house. Walks through the kitchen (tracking mud, I might add), past the $50 Home Hardware gift card sitting smack in the middle of the kitchen counter (thanks Jonathan!), and into my office, where a lot of things were rifled through, where I think my nice newish digital camera was taken, but where my 22″ flat screen and computer were left (thankfully — I could easily deal with the loss of the screen, but would hate to lose the computer, or at least the hard drive). Then, into my bedroom where a much more thorough search was performed, including looking in the boxes of board games and dominoes (probably for drugs). On my dresser is a box that is my life: I had my passport, an emergency credit card, a bunch of cash/coins, a gold coin my dad gave me after I graduated from middle school (I don’t know what the spot price of gold is, but it’s probably worth at least $200), and all kinds of other miscellany: ticket stubs from my first date, my PADI card, movie passes, etc. They took the box, and all the Canadian money, but (thankfully) left my passport and I think all of the cards, as well as the gold coin. What’s just dumb is that in another room, they threw out the ~$50 in Japanese Yen I had and a crisp $100 US bill (yes, the 3rd place poster award was in cash), and just left it here.

The chocolate bar from my desk was taken, and left, half-eaten, on the floor of Wayfare’s room. Gross, but it might give us the only clue in this case with some saliva/DNA evidence (the thief apparently wore gloves for the rest of the break-in).

The rest of my room and Wayfare’s were rifled through fairly thoroughly, but nothing else was taken. So our best guess was someone was looking for drugs rather than money (and boy, did they pick the wrong house to look for that!). Now I’ve got a long night of cleaning up ahead of me, as soon as the evidence guy from the London police leaves…

One thing I wasn’t impressed with was when I called the police to report that “I’d been broken into and robbed”, the operator got all pedantic on me, saying that it wasn’t robbery unless I was home at the time, so it was “just” a break-in. Then someone took my name and number and hung up, without even telling me when or if they would call back (we ended up waiting about an hour and a half)…

4 Responses to “Thievery”

  1. Ben Says:

    That fucking sucks man. I remember how it felt when my car was broken-into and rifled through, but I couldn’t even imagine how violated I would feel if it had happened to my house. It’s always in the back of my mind too, now that I have a laptop, if it was taken (and I’m sure it would be), I’d lose everything! Can you post pictures of the bashed in door? Good luck straightening things out John!

  2. Potato Says:

    Well, my camera was pretty much the only non-cash thing taken, but I think I can figure out how to work Wayfare’s and get some up :) That said, the pictures aren’t all that impressive, it just looks like the door is dirty and that the corner has been whittled away… but it’s a hard door to do even that much to. “Bashed in” perhaps isn’t the right term, since they must have at some point figured out that the door wasn’t locked (perhaps when banging on it finally moved it some, who knows), but it was wailed on with a brick!

    Wayfare has said that it could be worse, and that’s true: they were actually fairly considerate, taking the cash and leaving me with all my ID stuff and keepsakes, and there’s a lot more senseless damage that could have been done, or things that could have been taken (her example: they could have decided to spraypaint profanities on all the walls); but I still think it shouldn’t have happened at all.

  3. Wayfare Says:

    It sucks that it happened, but it could have been SO much worse in so many ways. After all, we weren’t home, the cat wasn’t home, the only window they broke is boarded up anyway (dumb thief) so we don’t have to bug the landlord to fix it right away, they left our passports, IDs and credit cards, they left our keepsakes, they left our computers and all of our electronic equipment, we had our laptops and my only piece of jewellery with us, they didn’t break anything in the house or even really make an unnecessary mess AND they left us with DNA evidence. The police who came by the house were also extremely nice and helpful. The thief didn’t even find all of our money (for any thieves reading this – we used to be a little afraid of Interac, but no more. We won’t be keeping any cash around the house anymore).

    I realize this is easier for me to say than Potato, he had a fair chunk of cash stolen and his camera. My bizarre need to keep *everything* seems to have saved me from losing anything. They went through two (of four) wallets in my desk, one of which is completely empty. They also went through my receipt box, my memory box, my wedding stuff box, my two jewellery boxes, a wallet box, and a completely empty decorative box. I think I must have frustrated the theif so much that he gave up on my room, my wallet with my emergency money was sitting on top of some papers in the middle of my desk drawer, in full sight if the drawer was opened all the way.

    Another benefit: Having the back door and downstairs window open for however many days seems to have helped our basement mould problem somewhat.

  4. Potato Says:

    Unfortunately, I also just noticed that my old laptop was taken. This was a celeron-400 machine: a real dinosaur. I had been considering donating it to charity recently, but figured it probably wasn’t powerful enough to be worthwhile to them (it didn’t even have wireless!). So I’m not going to be hurting for that too badly, but I am worried about what might be on it. I haven’t touched it in years (hopefully it won’t even boot for them), but whatever is on there wasn’t locked up behind password walls an encryption like my current computers are. Any data on there is bound to be years out of date and hopefully worthless, but there are a few things I can think of that can be used to cause mischief, but I don’t think there’s anything seriously damaging on there (e.g.: the info for my dad’s dial-up access is there, since it hasn’t changed, but what they would actually do with that is unclear).