My mom’s car got rifled through while it sat in our driveway last night (unusual for this neighbourhood). We hadn’t locked the doors, so it’s kind of our fault. That said, we’re not too upset, because the thieves took the strangest selection of things.
What was stolen:
[ul]
[li]Mom’s gym bag[/li][li]Mom’s gym shoes[/li][li]windshield mount for our GPS[/li][/ul]
What was present, but tossed aside rather than stolen:
[ul]
[li]our GPS[/li][li]our Bluetooth[/li][li]our CDs[/li][li]$40[/li][/ul]
Mom says that a woman she knows had the same thing happen to her–where only her gym stuff was stolen–a while back. Any suggestions about what could have motivated these thieves?
That’s what I would have thought, except that they actually physically removed the GPS and CDs from where they were, and dropped them on the seat. And the money drawer was open! That’s what got me confused.
I’ve been fortunate to not have been burgled, but I’ve known others, and this fits the pattern well, other than ignoring the cash.
Happened to a friend in San Francisco last year - we can only guess they wanted a change of clothes as they took a gym bag, but ignored the GPS. They did, however, shuffle through some CDs that were in the center console and took only an old U2 disc, but left the case behind.
When I first bought my Ranger (first brand new car) in 2003, I didn;t bother locking the doors on it when it was parked at my house. It’s a quiet area. A few months later someone stole some things from it. What was taken? The owners manual, the loose change I kept in it, and my CD’s (about 50 of them, in a case).
The next day I took a walk by the woods near my house. Found the CD’s still in the case sitting opened on top of a big rock. Looks like whoever took them started looking through it and saw it was all country CD’s and the Harry Potter sound track.
Probably not crackheads, but stoners.
Stoners have a habit of doing fairly random things that are really really funny (to them). “Check it out, this car is unlocked…let’s take the GPS mount, but not the GPS, they’ll come out in the morning and be like ‘WTF?’”
I had stoner friends that liked to go to the supermarket, get a some meat from the meat case and hide it behind the cereal. For no other reason then knowing that in a few days it would smell terrible and someone would have to go and find it.
When I am cleaning up my car, I use the seat as the collection area. I go through the car, throw everything that I want to remove onto the seat, and then finally stuff it all into a bag. Maybe the thieves got interrupted before they could fill the gym bag with her stuff. They just grabbed the gym bag and ran; taking only what had been loaded up already.
A friend of mine had thieves get into her car on the way to the clinic, and steal a large, secure bag on the front seat. It contained carefully labeled individual fecal samples from each member of her large family!
(Seems funny, but it was actually quite a nuisance for her. She had to get new containers at the clinic, have everyone in the family go through the unpleasantness of collecting another sample, and deliver all the samples to the clinic the next day. Then having an additional days delay in getting the results and appropriate medical treatment.)
Once, my obnoxious neighbor rifled my car. He was just being a nuisance and moved my stuff around, taking token items to show me I need to keep my car locked.
Probably an UL, but the story goes that, during one of the NYC sanitation-worker strikes of the 1970s, some enterprising New Yorkers would gift-wrap their garbage and just happen to leave it unattended in a public place, knowing it would quickly get stolen.
In a lot of ways, this makes sense. In an entirely different place in the city, I had the bulb of my bike horn stolen, but nothing else. Frustrating, since it meant I was noise-makerless and it didn’t even benefit the thief.
A few weeks ago I had someone come into my front yard, remove the $18 nozzle from my hose, and cut off the male hose end along with 6" of hose which they took.
Cost to the thief for the fitting to splice two hoses together? $3. Cost of the fitting to install a new male hose end? $3.
