So there I was, driving in on Friday morning, all
ready to go for a very long
most-of-the-day meeting. I know I wasn't going to get a
parking space anywhere near 650 Townsend for free, so I
planned on parking at the lot
right outside the main doors and paying for it. At least
it's close, and attended. As anyone who has had the
pleasure (pfft!) of seeing my
truck knows, my entire passenger seat is generally occupied
by a large boom box and a cd case full of cd's.
I love my music.
Can't drive a mile without it.
So the
routine is that you normally pull in, pull towards the
little shack in the middle of the
lot, and the attendant takes $10.00 from you (used to be
cheaper a few months ago) and you have your pick of whatever
spots are left open. I
typically pick a spot right near the entrance, facing the
bus stop there.
And the day goes on, meetings go well, I
get a lot of work done
after the meetings, everybody leaves, and it's nice and
quiet.
Whew.
Time to hunker
down and get some work
done. I strap on the headphones and begin cranking away.
I managed to somehow blow up yet another Thinkpad hard
drive, this time not even
physically connected to any Thinkpad at all. So I'm
reinstalling (yes, you guessed it, Windows) on the spare
laptop drive to configure the
Lucent wireless gateways (currently I had this particular
wireless gateway locked in a 'Closed Wireless Network'
configuration, so the only
way to get to it was through a Windows-only configuration
tool, and I had to have been broadcasting with my *REAL*
Lucent MAC address to get
to it, so VMWare was out of the question -- it uses that
PCNET32 interface, and a virtual MAC, so that fails..
anyway... where was I....)
So I get the laptop configured, all the drivers and
goodies are loaded, and I pack up and begin to get ready to
leave.
Standing back,
looking at my desk as if I'm a shepard on a tall hill
watching my flock, I survey the things on my desk, to see if
I'm going to need any of
them for the weekend.
"Ok, take this, no,
leave that, and let's not forget this..."
...you know the routine.
The mental inventory comes around once a day or more
sometimes.
Slowly I sling the backpack over one
shoulder, grab some books and a legal
pad, and walk out of 650 Townsend, up the escalators, over
to the left, past the ATM, and straight into the parking lot
for my truck.
"La la la lalaaaa...."
(thinking about what I'm going to do this weekend, so I can
be ahead of whatever is
about to bite into me on Monday). That Windows install went
just too smoothly. Yes, 475 reboots, but it didn't break.
"La la
laaaa..."
(opens passenger side truck
door to drop backpack and books onto the only space that can
hold them, the passenger
footwell area).
Hrm, this doesn't look right. My
entire bench seat is... empty. It looks like the same long,
empty expanse you see
when looking down a set of railroad tracks. I stand back and
think..
"Hrm, did I bring my radio today?
or did I take it to my
apartment to listen to some tunes?"
"No, I definately took the radio with
me.."
(mentally plays
back getting in the truck that morning)
My eyes
slowly pan around the truck's interior in the darkness.
"Hrm, every
thing looks..."
(cold, icy feeling comes
over me as I see the driver's windows smashed, and all the
glass in the darkness
on the driver's carpet, none on the seat.)
My radio
is gone, because someone decided they needed it more than I
did, and smashed my
truck windows to get into the truck to get it.
They had
to open the door (this radio is *VERY* large by the way, and
always covered, it's
the one on the right in this
picture) to get it out.
My glovebox wasn't
rifled through. My visors were not overturned. I even have a
120-volt to 12-volt invertor that plugs into the cigarette
lighter to power the
radio, and they UNPLUGGED THE RADIO from the invertor and
took only the radio. I also have some pendants/necklaces and
a "War Helmet" hanging
from the rear-view mirror. Those were also left alone. I had
a Jabra cell headset on the seat. They pulled the earcup off
of it, and tossed
them both on the seat. Gas tank wasn't syphoned. Tires
weren't slashed. Nothing but a missing boom box.
They only took the
radio.
Now I was left with a 12-mile drive
home, in the dark, with absolutely nothing for sound but the
whistling of the air
going through the smashed remains of my driver's side
windows at 65 miles-per-hour.
"I love my
music. Can't drive a mile
without it..."
I've lived my whole life in
CT, growing up in Hartford, Willimantic, Norwich, and
briefly in Brooklyn. I've
never had any car that I've ever owned broken into (and some
of them were quite worthy of it). Now that I live here, and
drive a 13-year-old truck, my vehicle has been vandalized a
total of 4 times in the past year alone.
I guess what
bothers me the most, besides the inconvenience of being out
of transportation for the next week or more, is that the
truck was no more than 50' from the front door of 650
Townsend, in an attended parking lot, and nobody saw this
assailant smash my windows (3/8's inch 4x4-package tempered
glass, not easy to just smash with an elbow or even a rock),
take out a nearly 3' long, 14" diameter radio, and walk
away?
Not happy. Not happy at all.
"$10.00 to break into your car, sir?"