Having your stuff stolen

They may as well have pissed on your shoes while they were at it. It wouldn't have been much worse.

London is the fucking worst for this shit.

I got my phone stolen off my desk AT WORK, which is behind THREE security doors.

shit, ronan: commiserations.

i bumped into a (much younger) fellow student on the bus the other day. while she'd been back in poland visiting her folks, her former flatmate had disappeared with various bits of her stuff ... and used her credit card (no, i don't know why she didn't have it with her) to pay for a night in a hotel. she seemed incredibly phlegmatic about the whole thing, i thought.

maybe she knows a good hitman.

I had an awesome Ninja Turtles eraser as a kid, it went missing and about a week later thew teacher found a pencil case stuffed full of erasers in another kid's desk! He'd gone on a thieving spree and nicked everyone's.

even that would be annoying.

I feel so deflated about this, been a weird week and I just CAN'T FUCKING AFFORD TO REPLACE this shit. I have no headphones for DJing now, and whoever nicked them will prob just sell for a tenner or something.

I got my phone stolen off my desk AT WORK, which is behind THREE security doors.

-- Tracer Hand

this is truly the worst

theft to me isnt so much about the money lost to me as the dick that did it to you, & if its someone you know you know that compounds it like 10x (not to mention someone you potentially have to stare in the face every day)

totally know where ronan is coming from re the 'valueless' notebooks

When I was a house-sharer in lol college, one of my housemates was an old non-collegiate crackhead who, as it turned out, liked to sell hundreds of my LPs for crack money. I had dreams about hurting him for years afterward.

I feel like I've told that story about 100,000 times so forgive me if it's appeared on ILX a few of them.

i had my bike stolen on my eighteenth birthday at lol college. strangely, i got it back when the thieves' van was stopped for speeding. my wife had her bike stolen last fall -- it was a crappy fifteen-year-old bike, why do that?

sorry ronan

I keep wishing I somehow left it in work but I never do that so doubt that's the case.....

i'm sorry, Ronan, that truly sucks. one of the worst parts is the feeling of being violated in some sense

i count myself lucky in that nothing's ever really been stolen from me barring one time that i was doing laundry and wandered off and returned to find that some crepey dude stole several pairs of my underwear

it was a crappy fifteen-year-old bike, why do that?

this happens when you need want a bike, see one, and can take it.

like, you gotta get somewhere across town

it's easier to rationalize if it's old or shitty

Sorry to hear that, Ronan.

We were burgled a few years ago. The hi-fi equipment and DVDs didn't matter; it was the bastards rifling through my wife's pants drawer and stealing the cheap ring with which I proposed to her that did the lasting damage.

Aw, Ronan, that sucks balls. I'll go clothseline someone for you if you want.

oh god, that's awful, Autumn

If I knew who it was that'd help Abbott. Gah...like I say a weird week for job and stuff so this is fucking awful....I need a promotion to ever replace this shit

it's easier to rationalize if it's old or shitty

my even shittier bike was sitting next to hers and didn't get stolen

I had my bike stolen at university from outside the sports centre while I was swimming. It was a shiny new middling-expensive bike though and the lock wasn't as hefty as it should have been. Lesson learned. U-locks, doubled up whenever possible, from then on. I was totally gutted, as I'd worked at utterly shitty jobs over the summer (including cleaning the toilets in a cereal factory) in order to buy the bike for myself.

This reminds me that I had the money stolen from my wallet while working at the aforementioned cereal factory cleaning job - though it was still a shitty thing for someone to do, that one was the fault of my young naive self however.

My third experience was last year at the Music Lovers Field Companion festival at the Sage in Gateshead, where, during one of the performances, someone stole my wallet from out of my bag while it was stowed under my seat or to the side of me, while I concentrated on the music, which I was photographing in addition. What really galls me with this one is the loss, not of the money, but of my wallet, which I'd bought in Australia as an early teenager and had had for over 10 years. I loved that wallet and it makes me so angry to think that someone simply cleaned it out of cash and then chucked it into a nearby bin most likely. I just wish that they'd taken the money there and then and left me the wallet, with all its sentimental value. Still makes me angry.

someone stole my bag at sonar (from under my feet while at dinner) which had sun cream, two passports (old & new), notebooks, dosh, and a couple of CDs in it

pretty much wrecked my night until I got back to my apt and had an e-mail from the apt. owner to say someone had phoned her to say they had my bag; I'd written her no. in one of my notebooks

next day, got back the bag, both passports, sunnies, and notebooks... they only took the dosh (small amount) and sun cream...

luckiest barca mugging story ever?

it was a crappy fifteen-year-old bike, why do that?

this happens when you need want a bike, see one, and can take it.

Someone I used to know (I'm not going to say "friend" because he was a twunt for reasons that will become clear in a moment) would regularly borrow bicycles when he was drunk and couldn't be bothered to walk home. Then the next day he'd return the bike to where he'd taken it, and leave a sarcastic note saying something like "I think you need to buy a better lock". One night, he's drunk, pulls his bike theft stunt, but two policemen catch him doing it. He gets arrested and taken to the police station, where he phones his parents, who happened to be on holiday in Europe at the time. He explained the situation to his father, who basically said "well hey, shit happens...", and hung up.

Ha! I am a one-man walking crime-wave (as a victim). I put people's insurance premiums up just by walking into the room. In the 10 years I've lived in London, I've been mugged four times, once with a weapon, and once getting moderately badly beaten up; had my flat burgled once; had three bikes stolen, all with U locks, and two from outside my current flat withing three months of each other; and had two phones and an ipod pickpocketed on various tubes and night buses. Oh, and had my two-year old son's trike nicked from outside the library!

And that's not counting the ILX d3ath thr3ats!

Indeed. I have VICTIM tattooed on my forehead. You know that?

xxxpost, great story, glad the shit got busted.

Hope it cheered you up a little Ronan, really, really terrible what happened. Hope you can get your notebooks back at the very least.

Touch wood; I have never been a victim of crime in London. (Had bikes and burglaries in Sheffield though, mugged in madrid with my dad as a child too).

Have lost stuff though. Lost my wallet after that ILX drinks thing at the castle with Ailsa. On the bus, due to being monumentally wankered. Woke up a 6am (maybe an hour after going to bed) realised I had lost wallet, canceled everything. Couple of days later I received the contents of the wallet, minus the wallet and cash (maybe 20 quid) in the post.

Once my car was broken into and a load of worthless crap was taken. The next day my XTC tape collection was found in a field. My rockist friends laughed at me.

Sorry, channelling Geir for a second there.

my car got its windows smashed in a couple months ago. they took a few keyboards I had for work and my coat. especially not cool: they broke 2 windows when clearly 1 was enough to rob me.

when i was eight a boy in my class called eric stole someone's watch and got busted when our teacher locked the door and searched all our desks and then the next day he strolled into school like a man of wealth because his grandmother had given him twenty dollars for owning up.

when I was 18 my apartment got robbed while I was passed out on the couch

the thieves drank the whiskey I had left in the freezer

it turned out to have been the landlords - they wrote themselves checks with the checkbook they stole

I moved out obv, carried most of my fucking shit four blocks to another apt building

fuck thieves

Left my cell phone in a cab while out of state. Tried to get it back from cab company but no dice.

I used this as an opportunity to change carriers and get a new phone, forgot about it. Today, I notice 11 new photos synced to my private FB album. Fairly sure I'm not a young hispanic/black lady, so suffice it to say, someone found and is using my old phone. I now have 11 pics of her making a fishface, showing off cleavage, and screencaps of pages she visited on Instagram.

Assuming she ever uploads the pics elsewhere, how long until they will show up on a reverse image search?

Even worse than having things stolen is not knowing whether something that's gone missing was stolen or you just lost it. I had a bike disappear a year ago and was never quite sure if it had been stolen from the rack where I thought I left it, or if I had just abandoned it outside some random bar while drunk.

Shortly before I was born, my parents home was burglarized and theives made of with my parents' canoe and reel-to-reel recorder. Sometimes I reflect on how much cooler my young life would have been worth those items.

There reel-to-reel, I found out later through my dad's meticulous catalog of index cards, was the repository for his entire Doors collection. He never actually spoke of the Doors to me, even when I started getting all American Prayer around age 13. But I know they were there once, on 1/4 inch tape.