In college I rented an apartment in the basement of my sister’s quiet, backwater, suburban home, and none of us locked our cars at night. The crime rate was as near to zero as you could hope to find. Mind you this was 16-years ago, and we were in a flag-lot, so the house was buried deep down an invisible driveway. When I found my car broken into one morning, I was furious, mostly at myself, even though I only lost the loose change from my ashtray… so just imagine how I felt last month when my car was broken into, my Tom-Tom GPS tracker for car and truck was stolen (never worked that well anyhow), half my dashboard ripped out, and something even more precious was stolen.
It was odd to me to see my car broken into back in the day. They opened my glove box only to find my Sony six-disc CD changer (which they left behind), but took all the loose change and what few CDs I had lying around. What irritated me most was that they left my door ajar and damn-near killed my battery.
This time was very different.
This time I was at my son’s new Kindergarten meeting with the teacher. I was only in there about 30-minutes, but I must have left the doors unlocked. It’s an easy mistake to make, and it doesn’t mean anything until the worst happens.
Did you know there are people who walk down the street looking into your car to see if you’ve left your doors unlocked? When they see it, it only takes a minute, and everything of any perceived value inside is gone for good, even when they later find it has no value.
I had my GPS hard-wired into the dash, so when he popped in (I say “he” because stats say virtually all car prowlers are young men,) he snatched it up, then grabbed the wire and ripped, ripped, ripped until he realized it wasn’t coming out. Half my dash was torn up and I found panels laying on the sidewalk, but this insult and injury wasn’t enough, he had to steal something that meant the most to me, and that has scared me to the point I can’t sleep most nights since then.
I had just received in the mail 320 photos from our last family vacation. They were all still in the postal box, and I hadn’t even had the chance to look at more than a few of them. It cost about $70, but as a “random box” it must have look pretty damn appealing.
He stole it.
He stole my vacation pictures of me with my kids.
Who does that?
Now obviously he didn’t know what was in it, so once he figured it out, he surely must have ditched it – unless he’s the sort of psycho that keeps mementos of his prowling victims – but why did he do that?
There are a few obvious problems here. Since it was still in the postal box, complete with address and all, he could have just placed it in ANY mail box, and it would have come back to me. The next problem is that this sociopath (a term I use freely, seeing as he stole photos of my children and threw them away) knows my address, what I look like, and how many children I have.
Luckily he was too dumb to notice the $1,000 DVD headrests, lest he’d have ripped the car in half trying to tear out the wiring harness on those as well.
I went back to the store to replace my lost GPS Navigation only to find that Tom Tom has changed their charging pin configuration… sweet. That means I can’t buy an exact replacement. I went with a far more expensive wide screen Magellan (and it’s actually far, far better than Tom Tom, which had all kinds of glitches to begin with.)
Still, this was a $300 lesson in caution. It doesn’t matter where you are, you have to be careful about your car. Always keep valuables out of sight, make sure you lock your doors, and don’t do anything conspicuous like put a big bag of valuables in the trunk in sight of people who might observe and rob accordingly. A good friend of mine had that happen in Vancouver a few years back. They got his camera and company laptop in one swift brick to the window, which cost him an additional $280 to fix.