"Worst burglar ever" or "What a way to start a birthday"

Justin here. I felt the need to vent a bit, so here goes.

My car got broken into today while I was at work. Smashed window, slightly broken side mirror, and a stolen radar detector. That in and of itself sucks. The window is going to be around $250, the radar detector was originally about $400 (had GPS and all sorts of nifty features), but was mostly just used as an accurate digital speedometer (it didn't go beep beep anymore). It still detected, but made no noise. That brings up the completely irrelevant question... If an officer shoots a radar gun in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Apparently not. So, it's probably only worth about $100 now at most.

I only have liability insurance on my car, so it's all on me to get it replaced, not that it went higher than my deductible would have been. I didn't appreciate having to spend two hours cleaning up the mess, filing a police report, calling the insurance company (not that there was anything they could do), and notifying campus security.

They started to rip out my stereo and rifle through my center console, but must have been interrupted. It could have been far worse. The best part about the whole thing is that there was a pair of nice Oakley's sitting right under the stereo in their Oakley soft case (hard to miss) that they completely left alone. What kind of thief breaks into a car and leaves an expensive pair of sunglasses alone?

Maybe it was the anti-burglar device I had installed in my car this week that drove them off.


Oh, and they took the USB flash drive that had my music on it. That one particularly annoyed me, as it was a promo flash drive that I'm probably not going to find a replacement for. It was dog-slow and didn't work in my wife's stereo, but it looked really cool.


I did appreciate that several people on campus came buy and told me how sorry they were and how crappy of a situation it must be. That helped.

It also helped that I had a great lunch with my wife at my favorite Thai restaurant and when I got home we celebrated my birthday early with a candle laden gluten free coconut chocolate gluten free decadent treat. She also gave me a great card from her and Sam, a couple of XBOX 360 games (Lego Indiana Jones & Space Chimps)... Sam LOVES the Lego series -- we've played them together for several hours over the last week. He mostly watches and tells us what to do.

Among the other items in the goodie bag were:
Punk Goes Classic Rock (the Punk Goes... series are the best cover CD's ever)
Sh*t My Dad Says (Great book based on a blog)
Chuck Norris Cannot be Stopped (400 facts about the man who knows neither fear nor mercy)
A subscription to The Week (I've been wanting that for a long while now).

So, all in all it was a pretty good day.