It appears you are saying he can’t leave it out even in his own home.
Damned right they can’t!
I still have my laptop and CD player. Know why? 'cause I guard it 24/7!!!. Sure I can’t go on holidays. Or to sleep. And I plugged those two girlscouts when they knocked on the back door selling cookies. But that was their responsability for not wearing bulletproof vests at all times, and I’ll be darned if I’m going to shirk my responsability of ownership.
Pardon me while I go check the dead-fall over the mailbox.
Always. You know, one of the “core values” of the Air Force is integrity, and yet without fail money, flashlights, uniform items, checklists, food, web belts and holsters, CDs, personal audio equipment, and all manner of other stuff goes “missing” on a regular basis. The most recent hot commodity is PT uniforms, because they are scarce and required wear when you are not in uniform over in the desert. This costs thousands of dollars to replace, and since a good bit of it is squadron provided it costs you tax money.
If that’s OK with you, I’ll continue to trust people to leave it alone knowing full well that they won’t. But I certainly won’t assume that my co-workers are thieves, even though some of them are.
Or perhaps I’ll just bow to reality and lock my stuff up. It may not be my fault if my stuff does get stolen, but why would I want to be a victim?
That really sucks, Otto. I hope you get it back.
And now I know better than to leave my new (to me) iPod on my desk. This thread has taught me to bring my iPod everywhere now. I just got it two days ago, and I’m from a small town originally, so sometimes it doesn’t occur to me that a lot of people are just out to get everything I own. A wake-up call, to be sure!
Hey, I’m not arguing that people with thieving coworkers should let their stuff get stolen, I’m just surprised that offices are such hotbeds of theft that one has to assume any unattended portable valuables are going to disappear. Perhaps I’ve just been lucky in the places I’ve worked. Also, I wipe boogers on everything I own.
I’m not saying you need to chain all of your possessions to your leg or anything. But you gotta use common sense. For example, I found out the hard way that you can open my car door with a pair of child’s scissors. So now I keep absolutely nothing of value in there. I have a friend who was leaving her window open all day for her cat. Despite multiple warnings from several people, she continued doing it until her apartment was “broken” into and half her valuable goods were stolen. In my opinion, it is partially her fault. The open window was an invitation. She should have known better.
When I leave home I lock the windows and doors. When I’m alone at a restaurant and I need to get up to get ketchup or whatever, I pick my purse up and take it with me, I don’t leave it by the chair or on the table. I never leave my bike unlocked and unattended. My iPod stays with me whenever I bring it anywhere. And so forth. Shit happens and I can fully understand the rage the OP is feeling. But I still think what he did was dumb.
I recently moved into a dorm type apartment. I lock my bedroom door, but we have a common room where one of the roommates had his brand new TV. The TV was right by the door, and they constantly left the door unlocked. I quit leaving my movie collection in the living room and when they asked why I told them that I didn’t want it getting stolen. They gave me funny looks then, but two or three days later, I come home and the Door is open and the TV is gone. I warned em.
Now it didn’t help that there was somebody home at the time. It was night time, and they like to leave the blinds open (ground floor) and the indoor lights on. People walking by can see everything that happens in the living room/kitchen area. I warned them about this too, but apparently somebody walked by, saw the TV, saw there was nobody in the room, and tried the doorknob. Lucky guy.
I hope you find who did it Otto, and put their head through a wall. I just got my phone back, my faith in humanity is restored.
Real simple: If I’m working on an office and away from my desk, anything of value I own is inside a locked drawer of my desk. It’s an easy habit to get into, and helps eliminate both the trauma of my stuff going missing and the temptation should a not-quite-honest person be around.
Heck, even the smallest things are liable to grow little feet in an office. A truly petty example is after I’d had surgery on my hand and had exactly one writing implement on my desk fat enough to get my still-very-sore hand around – and it was stolen. We’re talking a $1.29 ballpoint pen. That I’d put inside my closed (but not locked) top desk drawer, not even on the surface of my desk in plain sight. After I replaced it, I had to lock up or carry the replacement with me at all times till I could use a regular pen.
It’s not that I haven’t worked with trustworthy people. It’s just that in most offices, there are always people you don’t know coming through – clients, workers, friends of coworkers, etc. The vast majority of whom are allowed – yes, there are the suited thieves such as 5que talked about, but most of the time it’s someone you work with or someone else approved to be in the workspace. It’s not an environment where you have personal control over who’s allowed access, so rather than exercise control over the people, the easy solution is to exercise control over your possessions.
It’s really not rocket science.
Sorry for the loss of your iPod Otto, and for how that must make you feel around your co-workers now. It really does suck when it happens to you, and knowing that it happens all the time doesn’t help.
When our office manager went on vacation, someone took the opportunity to swipe the company toaster from the kitchenette. She was really upset when she got back and found that it was gone*. Some weeks later, another toaster appeared in the kitchen with a label on it that said “Please do not steal this! It is my own personal possession”. I figured she was being a little naive but as it turns out, it never got stolen. It’s a weird ethic out there - you can rob the company blind and no one seems to care, but thefts from co-workers are frowned upon. When my husband started working there, someone stole his computer off his desk one night in his first week. He was so nervous that they would blame him but over time he discovered that anything that’s not nailed down is apparently fair game out there.
*Her secret santa gift that year was postcards from around the world showing her toaster living it up in a variety of exotic locales. I believe that the toaster wrote that it had met and married a waffle maker and they’d settled down in Rome together. (The person who assisted the toaster in sending the postcards was not the same person who liberated it in the first place, just someone with a lot of appliance catalogues, a gluestick and plenty of time on their hands.)
Oh man, now I’m all paranoid that the CDs and my trilobite fossil are going to disappear off my desk this weekend. What was I thinking, leaving a few personal items on my desk?! From now on I’m just going to carry everything I own around with me. That will be much better.
OK, now you’re just being an ass. If you’ve left them there for a long time then you’re fine. If you’re working with people you don’t know, you’re rolling the dice. Simple as that. Even with that you shouldn’t be surprised if something shows up missing one day. I wouldn’t be.
A $12 CD is a little different than a $200 iPod. Of course, your office environment also plays a role in all of this. My office also uses keycards. When you step off the elvator you have access to the secretary only if you don’t have a card. If a person is in the work area, we know it. Things like laptops, iPods, PDAs, cellphones, etc. are routinely left on a desk while the owner goes to lunch, meetings, whatever. There has been one instance in the last 6 months where an iPod went missing. The owner sent a company-wide e-mail asking for it to be returned, no questions asked. 2 days later he had it back. Maybe just a different type of people inhabiting our fair, barren wasteland? Perhaps. But this is the exception to the rule. Leaving something so valuable and tempting out there asking to be stolen? Stupid.
Otto, thanks for the kind words. You have truly proven youself as a douchebag. And what the fuck is the problem with posting that info on a message board? It was posted last year and instead of warning me about posting it on a public board, you have to get in a personal dig. Fuck you and anything you stand for. At one point I actually thought you’d be a guy I’d have a beer with. Fuck you.
If there were hundreds of trilobites on eBay selling for $200 a pop, you should be.
See, that’s worth the loss of a toaster. That’s great.
I’m afraid to post on here for fear of missing items come Monday. I have been fortunate in my work-place theft. About 12 - 18 months ago, someone stole my breast milk from the company refrigerator. Now I know I took all necessary and reasonable precautions to keep it safe. Perhaps, in retrospect, I should have purchased a stainless steel, climate-controlled (40 degrees) safe, but I thought the one thing I had going for me was the undesirability of breast milk. I still don’t know who stole it (nor do I care), I just wonder what they did with it.
I have had my share of theft in my personal life. Sometimes I was careless; sometimes there was nothing more I could have done. It always sucked, but it was easier to swallow when I knew I did not contribute to the theft via my own carelessness.
Funniest response I have read in a long time. 
Yep. I think I get it. Otto was to blame in this life and the last one. 
I’ve been relatively lucky at work. I honestly think that I could leave a $20 bill on my desk and it would remain untouched. But if I put an apple pie in the fridge, it would be half gone by lunch. People have strange standards of honesty.
Errr… And your name is Ethan?
Perhaps it was someone doing research for this column?
Coming from you, that really hurts…not in the slightest.
If I knew that my spouse was sensitive about something, I wouldn’t post it to a message board.
Whatever guy. Don’t remember it, don’t really care about it.
Golly duffer, if I gave any part of a damn about what you thought about anything, this might have some meager potential to annoy.
Considering the time you put into the response, I guess you really don’t care. :non-winking Wally: