I’m guessing it was maybe one of the shifter cables that broke (?).
My car was broken into this summer. The thieve(s) took my GPS, radar detector, coin change, and a plastic bag in the backseat . . .
The bag contained our ancient, grody toilet seat I was taking to Home Depot for a match to a new seat. Snerk
This theft did make me feel really old. They left my 200+/- CDs 
I once had a friend whose car was found two days after it had been stolen. The only thing missing besides gas was his CD of Poison’s Greatest Hits.
When I was 17 my then-boyfriend had a bunch of “friends” over to our apartment. The following morning I was getting ready and reached for my deodorant on the bathroom shelf - it wasn’t there. Maybe it fell off the shelf…nope. Gone. Somebody stole my gross half-used Lady Speed Stick deodorant.
Some friends had a pair of skates they wanted to get rid of, so they placed them on the front porch within view of the side walk with a “FREE” sign. Nobody took them.
As a test they replace the “FREE” sign with a “$10” sign, the skates were gone within 30 minutes.
I’m married with children, of course home is downhill. My whole life is downhill…
Or broke into the car to leave another set of tickets.
It does seem fair that “Going Downhill,” and having an “Uphill Battle” both have negative connotations. 
When I was in my 20s I had an under dash stereo installed with deck mount speakers in the back. Because I did a half assed job of wiring in the stereo speakers; they would come disconnected all the time. One day I try to fire up the stereo and there’s no sound. I dutifully trace the wire from the back of my stereo down the side of the car and eventually find where the wire was separated. I spent a good 15 minutes looking for the speaker wire that must be somewhere near by to reattach it. Eventually in a fit, I realize I’m going to have to trace the speaker wire as well… only to find, of course, that there are no speakers on the back deck of the car. They’d been stolen. :smack:
Worst theft story: I used to live in a neighborhood where, no kidding, anything not nailed down would be taken. For instance, if you leaned your snow shovel against the side of the house and went in for a cup of hot coffee to warm up, the snow shovel would be gone.
So, worst story. My neighbor two doors down lost her snow shovel in exactly this way. She wasn’t gone 10 minutes. She came down asking if she could borrow MY shovel to finish clearing her walk. It was an interim clearing as it was still snowing. Down the block, one kid was clearing somebody’s walk while another one watched.
About an hour later, the snow had stopped, and these two kids knocked on her door. “Shovel your walk for $10?”
Now they had two shovels. One of them had HER snow shovel.
Sure kid, steal everybody’s shovels, then they will HAVE to pay you to shovel their walk.
My eldest sister lived in the Bronx during the early Eighties and owned a ~10-year-old Ford Maverick. I was with her when she bought that car. Cost her all of two bills.
She woke up one morning to find that $200 POS missing.
A few years back someone broke into my sisters’ house and stole a lot of stuff - she seemed a little offended that they stole all of her boyfriends CD’s (mostly rock, metal etc) and left all of hers ('80 soft-rock).
LOL, I think I may have been weirdly pleased if they had stolen by CDs as a commentary that I have cool tastes in music.
I’m getting worried that when I go to buy a new car in a year or two I won’t be able to find one with a CD player. I have thousands of bucks invested in CDs, I can’t imagine what it would cost to digitize my collection!
In the mid 80’s when I was a kid we left town for the weekend to visit the grandparents. Our house was broken into while we were gone. They took a lot of the usual stuff, our VCR (thing was already outdated, no remote, top loading, etc) my parents bedroom TV, some inexpensive jewlery of my mom’s, a lockbox, stuff like that. Apparently they never entered the kids’ rooms, as I had some money sitting out in plain sight right near the door that wasn’t taken (just a few bucks, but still, would have been half a second to snatch it up and pocket it).
But the weirdest thing they took? Frozen Lean Cuisine dinners from the freezer. Okay…
The pieces of crap also left the freezer open so everything in there melted, that cost more than the dinners they took.
Assuming you have a computer with a CD drive (or DVD drive, etc) you could “digitize”* your collection and it won’t cost you a dime, just the time needed to sit there and wait for each disc to rip to the harddrive, then switch discs until you get through them all.
*CD’s are already “digitized” being they are a digital medium with all songs/data stored as pits and lands representing binary 1’s and 0’s, but you probably mean encoding them into a popular format such as MP3.
In some neighborhoods, almost anything is fair game for the impoverished or desperate. I used to live where illegal aliens passed through, and many lacked shelter, relatives, transportation, or anything else that wasn’t on their backs. They used my garage shed as a toilet more than once. I had a hairbrush (!) and jacket stolen from my car, drapes (!) and framed pictures taken from the house, and once my garden hose was removed.
I wonder how much you can fence a used garden hose or some curtains for, but it can’t be much. I guess the curtains could be used as clothes, but I can’t see some vagrant wanting a garden hose to wear.
You use the hose to secure the drapes, belted-plaid style, around your waist.
Seriously - if you steal a hose and a few other tools, you can offer low-end yard care services and make some cash. I’d guess that’s where the hose went.
I worked at a Church’s Chicken back in the 80’s when I was in high school. At the front counter, we had these apple and pineapple pies that absolutely nobody ever bought. Soon after they hired another kid I knew from school, we noticed that pies started mysteriously disappearing. It was pretty obvious who was taking them, and at first we felt sorry for him because we thought maybe his family was destitute and he was starving. Nope. We started finding the uneaten pies in the trash. For some reason they didn’t fire him, but needless to say, he was never allowed anywhere near the till.
Another funny one was a failed burglary that happened at a crematory I used to deliver to. Like many crematories, it was located in an industrial area. They obviously didn’t know what it was; probably just breaking into a random business looking to steal tools or something. First they mowed down a chain link fence with a truck or van to get onto the property, then they bashed through an overhead roll-up door to get into the building. Inside there was a gate blocking off the back where the the cremation chambers and two refrigeration units were. In front of the gate was another refrigeration unit where the middle of the night calls were put. The gate was sort of beat up like someone was attempting to break through it, but apparently one of the crew took a peek inside the front fridge and saw wall to wall “inventory” and the job was aborted.
I picture the 3 Stooges doing this, with either Curly or Shemp being the one who looked in the cooler. “M…M…M…Moe! L…L…L…Larry!”
My first guess would be that the owner of the store assumed it to be abandoned and wanted the eyesore off the front of his business.
We had the tiny little bike suitable for training wheels (“My First Two-Wheeler!!”) for the kids. It was passed down between them over the years.
One day, it disappeared from the backyard. Thinking about it, this bike was of no possible use or interest to anyone over the age of 7 years old (when kids maybe make their first forays into petty theft). The bike was at least 8 years old and had done plenty of miles.
Then I thought maybe it was stolen by a parent who couldn’t afford to buy his kid a bike, and I got very depressed and reflective. Then I thought maybe it was just a cheap parent, and I got very angry.
For some reason, the theft of the kids’ bike bothered me on-and-off for quite some time. Much more than the couple of serious burglaries I have experienced. Maybe because it was…so pathetic.
It should cost you exactly 0 dollars. There’s plenty of free apps to rip and encode them.
Back when I was a long haired California hippie VW mechanic someone stole my 1957 VW bus; a friend found it abandoned about a mile from my apartment—the condenser wire on the distributor was burned through—the thief had a 50-50 chance of hot wiring it successfully and got it wrong.