About a year ago a friend let me take an old 12-speed bike out of his shed to take home and see if I wanted to take up bike riding as exercise. I like the stationary bike at the gym and thought a real ride might be even better. I borrowed one of the my kid’s helmets (she all growed up now and doesn’t bike anymore). Yes, it was pink, but I’m confident in my manhood, so off I went. It was OK, the bike was a cheapie so pedaling was difficult, especially uphill. On my third time out one of the chains broke (it had 2), so half the gears were non-functional and it made a HECK of a racket as I nursed it the last few miles home. My friend didn’t want it back, so I propped it against my garage while I decided what I was going to do with it. We don’t have a “fix a bike” charity nearby, and donating to Goodwill in that condition was not a good plan. I hate it when they laugh at me. So it sat. There, but forgotten. Like a side of parsley beside a steak.
Yesterday morning as I was getting the newspaper and letting the dog romp outside I noticed something shiny in the driveway near my car. It was still fairly dark out, so I couldn’t tell what it was until I bent over. Huh, a reflector of some sort. Looks like it came off a bike. How’d it get in the middle of my driveway? I don’t think I hit a cycler the evening before and dragged them home under the car (but I looked anyway). I showed it to my wife, who was also perplexed. I left for work, she to her doctor appointment.
A few hours later I got a text from her - “Hey, did you finally get rid of that bike?”
Me - “The one outside the garage? No, why?”
Her - “It’s gone”
Me - “Well that explains the reflector in the driveway…”
Yep, someone stole the old, rusty, non-working bike that we had been trying to figure out how to get rid of. I think I will report it to the police, but as a citizen hero report. If the perps had just asked I would have given them $10 to take it away. Their illicit gain was really their loss. 'Cause, you know, crime doesn’t pay. Junk removal, OTOH, can.
In reality it was probably a school kid prank more that a premeditated theft, but I think I’ll be getting a security cam or 2 out there now. Any odd theft stories from y’all?
Back in college, my friend had his car broken into. The didn’t steal the aftermarket radio or cds or speakers, or even the CASH SITTING ON THE DASHBOARD. NO, they wanted the El Cheapo $5 plastic fan that plugs into the cigarette lighter (remember those?)
I know this isn’t the thread topic, but I’m exceptionally curious. Two chains? What kind of bike was this? Google is only showing me some prototypes and some weird customs.
OK, sort of on-topic… I went to college with a nicer than average road bike. Especially the wheels. I no longer remember the details, but I saved my summer job money and bought some very nice rims and hubs and had a local guy build them up.
I was always careful to remove the front wheel and lock it with the back wheel and the frame, but one day I came out and my brakes and derailleurs were gone. Not long after that, someone popped the lock and away went the wheels. So for a couple years, I moved this frame from storage area to storage area as I changed apartments.
What must have been the summer before my last year, someone gifted me a similar bike but with frame damage. I transferred all the parts to my old frame, but I had few tools and no practical experience with the work. My bike, when done, worked fine, if you count having iffy brakes and only a couple of usable gears.
One day I came out of class to find this ‘new’ bike stolen completely. I walked around a while to see if anyone ditched it after a ride attempts, but no, it was fine.
About a week later, leaving the same class, there it was, back in the bike rack minus the lock. It was such a terrible bike to ride it apparently wasn’t worth permanently stealing.
My mother’s 1968 Mustang was stolen twice in about ten days. The first time it was found down by the river, missing wheels and seats. Those replaced, it was stolen again, and found the next morning. They had stolen a really stupid “surfer foot” gas pedal and given up on unlacing the steering wheel cover.
I still have it, by the way.
I also have a photo of a fairly nice car stereo head-end sitting on a traffic control post in the airport parking lot. First time I ever saw someone steal a car and leave the radio…
My friend’s car was broken into (it wasn’t locked) at the mall and all they stole was a little monster-man I made out of Blue-Tack and put on his dashboard. It was holding a small scepter which was actually a fake pearl earring.
I mean, it wasn’t even exceptionally great to look at since it was made by a bored car passenger and out of temporary wall adhesive.
My parents have some neighbors with a huge garden, and some years they grow pumpkins for Halloween.
One year they grew some absolutely enormous specimens; easily 150 lbs. They gave one to my parents for a display.
Pumpkins do not have a long live expectancy after carving, and this particular one had started to go bad even before Halloween–it had begun to sag and had an odd smell about it. It was stolen Halloween night (well after the trick-or-treating), never to be seen or heard of again.
My parents were pleased at this, as it meant not having to move it to the garbage; it probably would have fallen apart during transport and gotten disgusting pumpkin goo over both of them. They did feel bad for the poor soul that (presumably) had 150 lbs of half-rotten pumpkin deposited at their house, but it was no one in the neighborhood.
Reminds me of the apocryphal story about the guy who left a pair of Saints Season tickets on the dash of his unlocked car in New Orleans. Thieves took the car and left the tickets.
When I went to uni my sister gave me her ten speed, but she’s taller than I, and I began to believe the bike was trying to kill me. I swapped it to someone for a beat up, old, kids coaster bike, no hand breaks, no gears. It was awesome, fit me perfect, I rode it everywhere. Not thinking it was even worth the cost of a lock, I just had a left over wire chain part, so I’d wrap it around this shitty bike, so it looked like it was locked. (Someone suggested this to me and I thought it pure genius.) And it worked. For months. (Of course it helped that no one would want to steal such a bike!)
My friends all lived within walking distance and often the bike was left for a couple of days, pretend locked, in plain sight. Then I grew kinda bold, and left it for over a week, in front of a variety store, just up the street.
We were all universally shocked and appalled by the theft! But there was no sharing the story with anyone outside the group. They’d be all, “So, it was a really SHITTY bike? AND it wasn’t locked? What’s your problem?”
It was probably a prototypical custom. Or a custom prototype. Actually not, just an old bike from a friend’s shed. I presumed two chains because a chain broke and was dragging the ground but I managed to pedal it home with 1-2 working gears. I never really looked to see how that was possible. Perhaps the thief will…
I was in college, and my roommate’s parents had found an el cheapo bike at a garage sale. He already had a bike, so to save them the trouble taking it home he just gave it to me (I should note here that I am a terrible cyclist. I did earn the Cycling merit badge, and I have a scar on each limb to prove it ).
Anyway, I was also a TA at the time. I once mentioned that I had a bike to the class I was teaching/grading (“Sorry I’m late, I was riding my bike and got in a fight with a bush” “Who won?” “The bush”). After midterms, I had parked my bike outside of my girlfriend’s dorm, and came out the next day to find someone had stolen the brakes off the bike, but nothing else. I was more amused than anything else, but I decided not to ride the bike and I’d come move it off the rack later. It stuck around for a week before someone stole the rest of it. I wondered if they were surprised to find out the brakes were missing at the nearest hill (Although in retrospect, it could have been facilities removing an abandoned bike, but they moved awful fast).
It was 1975 in Coronado, Calif. I bought my first car - a '67 Chevelle with a cracked windshield - for a whopping $200. Finally, I had a place to hang my class of '72 tassel.
Someone stole the tassel. OK, my fault for not locking the car, but seriously, a high school tassel from a school 3000 miles away?? SERIOUSLY???
When I was high school, I had a 56 Ford sedan delivery. It was a real POS, the only redeeming value was it had a late model engine and transmission in it and ran good. Some got into it one day at school and stole the radio out of it. The radio was out of a 40’s era Studebaker and was a tube radio, it took about 3 minutes to warm up before it would play. Figure whoever took it was looking for something to steal, they would have taken anything not bolted down.
I left a banjo in the backseat of my unlocked car. When I got back, someone had added two more banjos and an accordion.
j/k
I had a broken bike stolen out of my shed in the back yard. They didn’t touch the other three working bikes. Saved me the trouble of getting rid of it.
Is there some sort of weird subculture of bike thieves that take POS bikes? I know that thieves aren’t exactly rocket surgeons, but WTF? Maybe they just want the parts that are still worth something.
My little brother was notorious for having bikes stolen during his adolescence. I think some of them were probably “stolen” by his shitty friends who were into the bad stuff, but some of them were a bit more self-inflicted, e.g., his attempt to lock his bike to a plastic lawn chair. Idiot. Of course, our soft-touch parents just bought him a new one.
).
(Although in retrospect, it could have been facilities removing an abandoned bike, but they moved awful fast).