not other people but me. i’m into airline blankets. my collection exceeds fifty of them in five years.
i challange myself not to get caught and never have been.
Some of these replies sound like teenagers shopping at Midnight Auto to get those elusive parts for their cars.
Once when I was burgled, the thief took a small ziplock out of an urn I had on a shelf. It was full of Mount St. Helens ash, which I had scooped off my car. He must of thought it was drugs, but he only got a bag of white sand. He also found my weed, but left it on the counter.
Another time I had a burglar downstairs in my garage stealing the stereo out of my car. My hero dog barked a lot and they ran away. The stereo was saved, but the bastard took both of the knobs with him. 
Yet another burglary involved at least two guys, and they were pros. They laboriously hacked an old 25-year old backpack from the frame, presumably to haul booty. There were perfectly good pillow cases all over, but this dunce spent time chopping off the frame. 
Back in my 20s I’d been out partying with work friends, came home to my small rental house and passed out with the lights still on and, apparently, the door unlocked. The next morning when I awoke there was a loaf of bread from the kitchen ripped open and laying in the middle of the living room floor, something I’d never do. Came to realize someone had peered into the lit house through the screen door, saw me sleeping and wandered in, went into the kitchen, ate some bread, dropped the loaf and took my roughout cowboy boots from the foot of the bed where I lay, all with the light on.
If I’d woken up that would have been quite a scuffle. I liked those boots.
In college, someone stole my ethics textbook. Really.
Charlie Chaplin’s corpse. Well, you can’t keep a good man down.
One theft I read about quite a few years ago: a box full of frozen human heads. Stolen from the back of a doctor’s vehicle; they were to be used for surgical practice as I recall.
Doctor: “I hope he opened that box, took one look and fainted dead away.”
seriously? i mean there is organ donation but your cranium?
what’s the going price and is it legal?
In 1990, I managed a record store in Bellevue WA. One night, someone smashed the front door and the alarm went off. They went straight to the Grateful Dead section, and hauled the entire set of LPs off into the night. Probably 50 or so LPs. We found a trail of Dead LPs leading out the door and up the sidewalk.
I showed them to the cop and he laughed his ass off.
When I was a teenager I lived with my then-boyfriend who always had loser friends over to drink and smoke drugs. One morning after a bunch of people had been in our house I was getting ready for work and reached for my anti-perspirant and it wasn’t there. I kept it on a shelf in the bathroom and it hadn’t fallen or been moved - it was GONE. Yes, somebody actually stole my pit-stick.
I have a relatively expensive car, someone stole my antenna. Granted, it’s a nice antenna.
Anywho, I told my friends about it. That day I was meeting them for lunch. When they showed up, one of my friends had a present for me. He handed me a matching antenna and told me he got it from an identical car in the parking garage just now! I was aghast, and told him to take it back right this instant! He did, thankfully. Now my friends are not run-of-the-mill jacks. These guys are Corporate VPs and such. Resorting to petty theft, geez…
In about 1984, I went out to the parking lot and tried to start my 1978 AMC Hornet. It wouldn’t start, so I open the hood to see if there is anything obviously wrong. The distributor cap is loose, so I lift it up. Someone had stolen the rotor. I was quite baffled about that one.
We came out of a movie theater once to find that my friend’s car had a hole in the windshield. It took a good half hour or so before someone realized that it wasn’t a random act of vandalism: the perpetrators had cut out a piece of the glass to steal the inspection stickers.
In college, I had a king from one of my chess sets stolen. My frustration at the loss probably matches the uselessness of the object to the thief.
I once saw a guy violently bust open and take the change out of one of those Ronald McDonald House coin collection boxes at McDonald’s, in full view of the staff and customers. He even stuck around for a few minutes afterward! Nobody said anything, but I was pretty freaked out.
When I was in high school my family’s house got robbed. They were “smart” enough to manage to find the only stuff in our house worth stealing - dad’s vintage baseball cards and mom’s only real diamond piece of jewelry.
They also stole my brand new Airwalk shoes, which, before they became a Payless brand, were a big deal for a short while. Still, they didn’t cost even over $100 (either $60 or $80 I think) but I was so friggin’ bummed. They were probably the first nice thing I ever bought myself and some douchebag burglars took them!
My best friend and I sat on the floor in front of our lockers every day for 2 weeks at lunchtime, trying to find a kid wearing my shoes. Never found them.
Argh.
Back in 1979 a friend and I were sitting on the balcony of our hotel room at the old Tudor Hotel in NY watching a bunch of guys with a rather large well equipped van going down the street stripping cars. 5 minute engine removal :eek:
I do environmental consulting for a living. Several years ago we placed several continuous flow meters at various points along the local river, which runs clear and shallow (meaning, the meters were visible). The second time we went to upload our data, we found one of the meters had been stolen.
That was the day my company became yet another victim of the vast criminal underground dealing in stolen continuous flow meters.
That’s really impressive. How can you even cut a windshield? They’re laminated with plastic, I think. I guess you could smash it with a hammer and then slice off the part you want with a box cutter but it’s hardly a stealthy operation.
We have a local guy who steals lady’s socks. Just socks. He’s gone to jail a few times for breaking into homes just to steal socks. He’s received mental heath help but once out of jail, does it again.
As a Peace Corps volunteer, I had a period of time where somebody was pilfering my powdered milk. Every time I’d go to my can, it’d be lower than it should be. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t slowly going crazy.
I used to work in a convenience store. One day, I was dusting and fronting the merchandise, and I found a woman putting on deodorant. This was one of our regular thieves…she liked to steal the packs of cigarettes we had on display, as well as other things.