Wednesday, July 05, 2006

The anatomy of a crime: How I lost my cell charger

Yesterday was the one week anniversary of the owners of my laptop, cash, digital camera came back for their stuff.. cokeheads!
Lets go back a bit further so you can see the series of unfortunate events that lead to this tragedy. The Saturday before that I went to the beach.. had fun was romping around and strained my back in the processes(I'm not as young as I used to be). Anyways the pain from my injury kicked in on Saturday night which pretty much disabled me for the rest of the weekend into Monday.
Upon reaching home on Monday evening I looked on my front seat at my heavy laptop bag and decided that with my back pains I would leave it in my car and not carry it up the stairs not to use it just to carry it back down in the morning. So I just took out some documents out of the bag and pushed it off the front seat down to the floor where nobody could see it. The tint on my car is pretty dark + where I park my car is pitch black so it should be safe.

Anyways I made my way upstairs and got settled in, ate dinner, watched the ring 2 and war of the worlds. At this point in time its after 10pm, lets call some friends.. between then and 12:30am Tuesday I chatted on the phone with various friends and had a shower after which I decided it was time to retire for the night. I should mention I have two beds in my apartment, a fold out sofa bed in front of the TV which I usually sleep on as its right beside a big window and a nice queen sized bed in my bedroom which I hardly use. When I was deciding where to sleep that night I realized that my real bed in my bedroom was much more comfortable than the other one so I went into my room and pushed up the door(big mistake). That door and the walls does an excellent job of keeping sound out.. world war 3 could be going on outside and I wouldn't hear.

After a nice peaceful nights rest I woke up at 6:30am on Tuesday, went out into my living room, checked the missed calls on my cellphone which I left on my pool table and looked around to notice that it seemed as if it was very windy in my apartment that night, papers were all over the place and the curtains disturbed. I thought to myself for a little that I should have slept outside last night as I looked around at what the wind did when I noticed 1 item that the wind couldn't have blown down, a battery. More specifically a battery for my digital camera. I then turned to my computer table where I usually keep my digital camera plugged, it was gone. I turned around to the window by the door and of course the window was open.
In this picture you can see the window in question on the left and a piece of the computer table on the right. The cokehead used a long stick I assume to fish the camera off the table, that is over 10 feet away from the window.
It is common knowledge that people will fish out stuff from your house if you leave windows open. The thing is that before I went to bed that night I remember specifically going over to that window and ensuring it was locked properly.. oh well that plan failed I guess. The backup plan is not to keep anything out in the open that could be fished out.. another failure. Q: How does one fish out a little rectangular camera over 10 feet away? A: via the little loopy string that's on it that prevents you from dropping the camera when you are walking.. I guess I forgot about that little detail.
So I stood there thinking to myself that it was about time I got a better camera, thanks thieves.. when I realized.. where is my pants I wore to work yesterday? more importantly where is my wallet which I most likely left in the pants I wore yesterday? upon reaching home tired yesterday, I apparently took off my clothes and left them in a big pile on the pool table, so I found the shirt but no pants. I searched down my apartment for the missing pants or wallet to no avail. This posed a bit of a problem as I had a few credit cards in there and would have to cancel them along with my debit card. Before calling the bank I decided to see what went on outside if they attempted to break into my front patio, which is grilled in, only to find my pants hung up on a chair.?? :-/ and the grill/lock not penetrated.
This is exactly how you know its a cokehead that did the deed, he fished out my pants, looked for keys, there were none, looked for money.. found a wallet with money, took out the money out of the wallet, left the unchanged check, credit and debit cards intact, put back in the wallet and left it for me on my patio. I was glad he/they left the wallet with the cards still but still pissed the money was gone. They got away with $6220.00(I keep good books). After taking out the paper money from my wallet, he removed a $20 coin from my pocket leaving behind three $5 coins and two $1 coins.. battyman! I make all effort not to walk around with any large sum of money but like a week or so before I sold my old phone to my friend and hence had that much money on me.. I haven't even been to the ATM since the start of the year.. I mostly use my credit card and checks for monetary transactions.
I thought I was in the clear then, they could only fish out my pants and my camera.. when it dawned on me.. where is my laptop, the car! my car has an alarm, it should be safe still right?
I went downstairs and as I turned the corner I saw my front left window was smashed in, I looked inside and of course no laptop. On the front seat was a big round rock covered in a white towel along with a bunch of glass from the window. When I pushed the button on the remote, the beeps indicated to me that the alarm did go off and of course I didn't hear it, the one time I slept in my sound proof room they decided to break into my car.
How does all of this play into the title of the thread though: How I lost my cell charger? My phone is a palm treo and the charger I had for it was just a usb cable that also doubled as a hot sync cable which I kept in my laptop bag which is now being held by some cokehead. These cables/chargers are impossible to get in Jamaica as not many people have treos.. so now I am stuck with a 1/2 dead phone, no way to charge it, no laptop to do work and its Tuesday morning at 8am.
At this point in time I called my boss told him what happened and told him I would be coming into work a bit later today as I had the police and my car window to deal with, he was cool with that. While I was at the police station 30 minutes later I got a call from him asking me if I reach work yet.. wtf? so he said to just call him when I reached in office(He works between 3 buildings, I work between 2 buildings across town so we don't cross paths much). After the police station I went to the office I told him I would be working from that day and didn't see him so I gave him the call that he requested earlier. I called him, he has work for me to do. What does he really expect me to do work on they just stole my laptop and he knew this. After he dumped a bunch of work for me to do I decided that I needed to get my window fixed first of all. My insurance company sent me to a place where they replaced my window for free(well at least it doesn't hurt my premiums). Then I go downtown to my other building where I sat and waited for about 4 hours for some slacker lady to give me a replacement laptop.. just so I could consider starting the work that was dished out to me earlier. Of course by the time I got the replacement it was 5:10pm.. quiting time is 4:50pm for me. So I just left for home and put that stress behind me. Currently the situation is under review by some risk mitigation team in my company to decide how much $$$ I owe them for their lost property.. yes, kick me while I am down wont ya.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So did you really have to pay for it? I also have a company provided notebook and I've wondered how they would deal with it, if it's stolen while in my possession.

Adrian said...

aww.. this bad story :(

Well of course I was found guilty of negligence and my company sent me an email like 3 months later saying I owed them some money and would take it in the form of a salary deduction.

I assumed that they would have sent me a form authorizing this but I never heard from them again and I didn't notice anything being deducted on my pay slips since then. Being the good employee I am I even did my due diligence and contacted the guy responsible for company owned hardware in November and pointed out that nobody made attempts to collect their money, he just said that I didn't need to worry about it.

Lets just hope they don't surprise me and present a bill when I am leaving the company.