The antenna from my car. I thought at first it was just vandalism, but it hadn’t been broken off, they’d actually brought a wrench and removed it.
One of four plastic patio chairs.
The nozzle on my garden hose.
Apparently, I’m not a target for professional thieves or junkies who need some quick cash, I just attract people with very specific requirements.
MY crappy former housemate stole my SHOES when he moved out, along with some drinking glasses and mugs. We got most of it back (all but 2 glasses - I guess he was too stupid to get his own). But my SHOES? They were 3 years old, dirty, and they had a big sulfuric acid burn on the right shoe! At the time, they only cost 40$ - I don’t think any charity or anything would even take them anymore! Stupid fuck. We threatened the cops on him and his scumbitch girlfriend (who was in on it). Total value of things stolen was maybe 50$, but seeing how theft is ILLEGAL, we decided to let him know that we WOULD get our stuff back. In the process, his parents were informed (we had to call them to contact him since he didnt have a phone number yet). Basically, we made sure to put him in such an uncomfortable position relative to his friends and family, that he HAD to return our stuff. He did, in the middle of the night, to the building superintendents office. What a chickenwuss. He even had his scumbitch answer our emails to HIM on his behalf. :rolleyes:
A few months ago, I was in a car accident, and my car was totalled.
:: moment of silence ::
Anyway, I was pretty traumatized at the time, and I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be seeing my car again for a few weeks, so I didn’t empty it of my possessions. At some point, someone stole everything they could get their hands on. The only obviously valuable and useful thing taken was my camera. Also taken were:
And most insulting to me…
My portable CD player and car stereo were, oddly, NOT taken. I guess the thief already had those things. And desperately needed a telescope lens.
The glovebox latch from my Volkswagen beetle. I parked at the P.O. club, was inside for about two hours, and when I came out, it was gone. I hadn’t locked the car (This was winter in Iceland and locks tend to freeze there) nor the glovebox, so it would have been a minute’s work with a wrench. Took a lot of nerve, though, with all the foot traffic.
DD
From the back of my father’s (locked) truck while coming home from college just before winter exams, many years ago: Not my laundry, Not my jewelry or cd’s, Nothing any thief would want.
They simply ripped out the lock on his truck cap and grabbed the first thing they touched. The bag with my notes for class and my Riverside Shakespeare.
After I replaced the bag and book (covered by insurance) and begged classmates in Honors Shakespeare for help in restoring my notes, the bag was recovered in the parking lot of a grocery store a week later, missing my PENCIL SHARPENER and a calculator (which had some value.)
I hope whatever idiot did this really liked the pencil sharpener. The total loss to me was limited to additional stress on a first-semester Honors student taking 18 credit hours, 3 hours of which were a Shakespeare class lead by a psychopath. I really needed the notes. Damn. I still got 80% on that test, so I shouldn’t complain.
At my old workplace, someone on the cleaning crew (we think) stole someone’s “Jesus Loves Me” picture frame. That struck me as a bit, uh, sinful.
More of a mugging really, but still applies.
On my way to class at the University of Washington, a guy came up to me and demanded my backpack. I, of course, said “Fuck off,” and he immediately punched me right in the face and ran off with my backpack.
He obviously soon realized what I already knew. I found my backpack about a block away with my wallet open on top of it, empty, with absolutely no credit cards or anything else of value, much the way is was when he stole it. And much the way it was every day as I was one of the most pathetically poor people around.
Fight crime! Be poor!
I was 16 and at band camp. My idiot roommate invited over this guy she knew and was hot & bothered about. It was clear to her he was grooving on me and not her after about five minutes, so she left the room. I was clueless.
He goes to make his move. I tell him I have a boyfriend – true, but also my attempt at getting him to back off. He doesn’t care. He’s a wrestler and he’s on top of me, holding me down. Fortunately, I’m strong for a woman and I have a brother and know how to fight back, which I do. He leaves in a huff (poor baby!) and takes…my sunglasses. He’d put them on his hat earlier and just walked out with them.
I didn’t realize until later that he took them. They were my favorite sunglasses: blue wire rims and the lenses flipped up/down. (Yes, this was the mid-eighties when flippy sunglasses were cool.)
I was so mad that he took my sunglasses, that it didn’t even occur to me that having to fight a boy to get him off of my body and out of my room falls under the category of sexual assault. It took me a few years to get that, in fact. The assault was too big & complicated for me to understand at 16, but the theft was something I could focus on. But even now, at 32, I wish I had those sunglasses back.
While my mother and I were at a concert once (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), someone broke into my mother’s piece of crap car and stole all the empty soda cans that had been lying all over the back seat. Nothing else was gone, but whoever it was pried out the lock on the passenger side door, and it wouldn’t lock anymore after that.
My dad has a cottage, and it always gets broken into by random idiots. We soon learned to hide everything of value.
Sometimes, we get targeted by professional thieves, who take things I would never dream that anyone would, or even could, steal.
Once, they stole our damn stove! A solid, cast-iron Franklin wood-burning stove - admittedly quite valuable, but I know it took four strong guys a half-day to carry it in from the road - (I helped to heft its replacement) - gainful honest employment would seem to be more rewarding & less effort. :rolleyes:
The next stove was attached by steel bolts inside two lengths of loose pipe to large concrete blocks cemented in place … so, far, it is still there.
I stole a ziplog bag full of UNused Q-Tips from a party I was at once. Not a box, a bag. I still have them! That was 7 or so years ago. Haven’t stolen anything since.
I’m going to hell. 
What an A-hole. I hope you gave him the knee where it hurts most.
I don’t know that this is theft necessarily, but:
I used to have a roommate that wore my socks. I had noticed that some socks were missing but I lose stuff all the time. One day I was walking by his room and saw, in a huge poile of clothes, what appeared to be a pair of my socks. A fairly distinctive pair, which is what got me going.
Knowing he wouldn’t be home for a while, I went into the room and went through the pile, discovering about six or seven pairs of socks that I was pretty darn sure were mine. I just took them back.
Eventually, this became a habit, and I never confronted him about it. I would just go into his room and recover my socks from his pile on occasion. It was never shirts, pants, underwear, belts, nothing but socks. He had is own socks, in fact he had quite a prodigous collection.
Sometimes I’ll borrow something and then forget that it’s not mine, because I’ve gotten used to it. I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if he thought that I was taking his socks out of his dirty laundry pile and washing them, and putting them in my sock drawer? If I may, that’s an even stranger thing to do.
So I wonder if we were both just rolling our eyes at the strangeness of the other.
I’ve had my car radio antenna stolen, too! Another instance, I suspect, of people using an apartment parking lot as their own free auto-parts store. :rolleyes:
We had somebody smash a side window on our car to steal a package of danish, those really cheap kind in the flat foil pan from a supermarket bakery section.
A $75 window to get just that.
Stupid!