Our Very, Very Bad Day
Well, you'd think the world would cut us some slack but nooooo...
Last night our car was broken into, and all of our packages filled with books which we had sold over the last 7-10 days were in it.
We went down this morning to drive to the Post Office and realized that stuff in the car had been rifled through. We were so perplexed and absorbed in figuring out what they had taken that, at first, we actually forgot about the packages. But then the reality hit us.
The thieves took all the books, and the CDs as well. But they generously left us our spare change.
You can imagine how we felt. Devastated doesn't even begin to cover it. And violated, angry, sad.
We called the police and then waited forever the evidence technician to come over and try to get some fingerprints. He was able to get some prints off a couple of unopened packages of venetian blinds, but I don't know what good that will do anyone, really. I'll bet they had many unrelated prints on them, including ours.
We also ed our insurance company who said that the packages are not covered under our auto insurance. Apparently, home insurance usually covers that sort of thing, and of course we don't have that. But we should, I suppose.
We've often kept packages in the car overnight because we have dark windows, and it has been OK so far, but obviously we will never do it again. I can't imagine what we were thinking. We don't live in the burbs anymore. This is Chicago, and not the fanciest neighborhood either.
The police said that this is not at all uncommon. It's all very organized. The thieves go around in groups. Some go ahead with flashlights shining them in car windows. When they see something good they call the car which is driving some distance behind. The car pulls up along side the vehicle and then they open your car and load the stuff out.
My only consolation is that the thieves are going to be mightily pissed off when they discover that all that those packages contain is old books. The sad thing about that is that they will likely just throw them in a dumpster, unless they try to sell them to some other book dealer.
We alerted all of the bookstores we know in case they do try to get rid of them. Again, I doubt anything will come of it. And, there are a couple of sleazy book dealers in town who'll buy anything from anyone, no questions asked.
After the police left, we went to work to try to regroup. Our loss was worse than we thought. It will be really hard to recover. One consolation, though, in cleaning out the car we found the CDs under another seat. Our classical music is apparently not suitable for thieves. They also took some good binoculars and a nice large pocket knife, and it turned out that they took a couple of the venetian blinds as well, choosing carefully, apparently, since they took two of one size and one of the other.
To top it all off, the evidence tech got black fingerprint goop on the back seat of the car as well. Just another annoying thing to have to deal with.
All in all, a very bad day here.
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