My nearly 20 year old truck was broken into twice.
First time the thief got a broken voltage converter that had a tendency to start smoking when you plugged it in to the cigarette lighter. Second time he got one reusable shopping bag, value 49 cents.
I’ve answered 9-1-1 calls (several times) of persons reporting weeds (no, not THAT weed) being stolen from the roadside. A few livestock owners drive around and collect certain weeds from the roadside right-of-way to supplement animal feed. Always a fun thing for the police to explain to the complainant.
I will never forget the night my mom looked out the front window and saw a man rolling our city-supplied garbage cart down the driveway. He was around the corner before my brother got to the door. He was BOOKIN IT with our cart!
That one is perfectly explainable. Car batteries come with a built-in recycling fee in many states. You are supposed to take the old one in for a partial refund/discount on the new one when you replace them but you can also exchange discarded ones for cash as well (like soda cans except much more valuable). For anyone with a connection to an auto parts store, that is the equivalent of leaving a $10 bill beside the road and putting a note that on it that it is unwanted. It wouldn’t be worth it to me to make a special trip with heavy, dirty thing but it is free money to anyone that is already going that way anyway.
Wow. I thought I was the only one to have a Maverick stolen. in 1988 I was living in Sacramento, CA. A customer gave me a red 1973, 6 cyl, C4 auto trans, A/C equipped Maverick just to get it out of his way. I brought it home, parked on my street and someone stole it that night. I thought maybe some neighbor had it towed. I called the police.
“Where did you tow my car, please?”
Nice lady at the police dept. “We didn’t tow it.”
“But it’s gone, you must have towed it.”
Again very nicely, “No, we did not. Would you like to file a stolen vehicle report?”
“Who would steal a Maverick?”
“There are some very strange people out there.” The lady who answers the phone at the police department must hear a lot of very odd things.
So I filed a stolen vehicle report. I checked in with the police every so often but it never turned up.
So if you want to get away with auto theft, steal a Maverick.
Oh, I remember-someone got into my car. I had one of those stereos with a removable face plate (ostensibly to deter theft)-so of course that night I left it behind. The thief took that off-but left the rest of the stereo behind and undisturbed! An apartment employee found it for me, and it went right back on with no issue. But the bugger also took my CD case, with a lot of my favorite albums-that cost a lot to get them repurchased, but unless he liked my stuff didn’t do the thief much good.
Circa 1956, someone broke into my father’s car. All that was missing, when we discovered this, was his Bible.
My first husband could be hilarious. He was a grocer, and he saw a teen girl stealing popsicles. He sauntered up to her and struck up a conversation – a long one. She began to shiver, and popsicle colors began to spread across the top of her shorts. He kept chatting. Finally, out of mercy, he asked her if she would like to call her folks to get a ride home.
I knew someone who bought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken then went into a store before heading home to dinner. While she was there a thief smashed her window and stole the chicken. That was all. She never locked her car doors after that figuring anything she had inside was cheaper that another new window.
The strangest thing I have heard of that was stolen was a Chevrolet. What made it strange was, it was stolen by Henry Ford. It turned out that Ford had a habit of renting competitors’ cars to see how he could improve Fords, and when he valet parked a rented Chevy one day, he was given back someone else’s car by mistake.
I don’t lock my Jeep either, partly because of that and also because the driver’s side lock will sometimes slip and stay locked. I’d have to crawl over the passenger side and then take the entire door apart to unlock it. Losing my ashtray change sometimes is cheaper than getting the door fixed.
My buddy who also has a Jeep had his soft-top windows stolen once. They just zipped them out and took them.
In the early seventies, while I was in high school, someone stole the lock from my bike and left the bike behind. I assumed it was because it was a girl’s three speed.
It was a crumby cylindrical combination lock. I already had figured out that if you pulled on it a little, you could spin the wheels and they’d visibly bump forward when you reached the right number. It’s possible that they stole it just to show how easy it was to take off.