Robbed again

[vinnyT]

Perhaps it's not random, but personal and somebody just doesn't like you.

Or, poss more likely, some of your neighbours don't appreciate you littering their street with an old junker.

[steve threlfall]

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-AuFMpZXBNA

Do this to your car

[MadduckUK]

that was fun

[Brucelles]

Perhaps it's not random, but personal and somebody just doesn't like you.

Or, poss more likely, some of your neighbours don't appreciate you littering their street with an old junker.

Cheeky bastard!

[Vroomparrot]

Thieves once stole the entire parcel shelf out of my car because it had some cheapo pioneer speakers (badly fitted by me) in - £25 from Argos! What is the point? Thieves these days just don't seem to have any standards.

[Fatboy40]

Thieves once stole the entire parcel shelf out of my car because it had some cheapo pioneer speakers (badly fitted by me) in - £25 from Argos! What is the point? Thieves these days just don't seem to have any standards.

Had exactly the same thing happen to me, they obviously thought my dirt cheap unbranded 16 by 9's bought from Blackbush Sunday Market were something worthwhile

I ended up with a smashed window, glass everywhere, the hassle of replacing it and farting around getting a parcel shelf from a scrap yard. I would rather have just given the scroats a tenner as that's what they cost me !.

[acrobat]

id rather have given them a landmine disguised as a fairy cake

[Brucelles]

It did occur to me that I should have just left the thing unlocked. They probably wouldn't have nicked anything as there's little worth having in there, unless you take the car apart.

Except my music, of course. They could learn a lot from my music selection.

[MadduckUK]

you say "robbed again".. what happened the last time? is someone out to get you?

[Brucelles]

Those bloody Belgian bastards who tried to nick my car came back last night. Fortunately(ish) I was taking out the trash and saw them so I chased them off. They have screwed up the drivers side door now though. I thought the first time that they weren’t very bright, but this time they were spectacularly dim. Unbeknownst to them, all the time they were working to break into the driver’s side door, all three other doors were unlocked. They must have broken the central locking when they broke the passenger side door, and I didn’t notice. What do they teach these clowns in school?

I called the police and gave them the number of their car and a description, but the number plate 626516, doesn’t look like a real Belgian one which should be XXXnnn, still one never knows, maybe the buggers will end up staring through bars.

MadduckUK, that car is a criminal magnet. When I lived in Luxembourg, where I bought it, some junkies broke into it, by the simple means of smashing the front windscreen. The garage door opener was in the map compartment so they used that to open my garage door and get into the house. They managed to grab my wife's handbag and a craptop (550Mhz laptop) before our then dog woke up and ate one of them's hand.

Then I was driving out of the Grund (Luxembourgish for "Ground", the name of a little village in a pit) under one of Luxembourg's immense bridges when some prankster dropped a water balloon on me. The Viaduct is some 32 metres above the road. The balloon probably contained about 500gms of water and thus weighed about 500gms (or just over a pound to you non-Europeans), Upon being released it accelerated at 9.8 metres per second2 So, after 32 metres it had accelerated to about 30 m/s. This is equivalent to around 108 Km/Hour. It is a steep hill, but I have 300bhp and use it, so I was doing 80kph uphill when the balloon hit the windscreen. Allowing for the angle of impact I figure that 500gms of water hit my windscreen at a combined speed of 180kph or about 110 mph.

Can you imagine what would happen if a baseball or a cricket ball hit your windscreen if it had been bowled at that speed? Well, this water balloon weighed twice as much, but it wasn't as hard. Needless to say it smashed the windscreen into windscreensmithereens and then, while I parked it outside a garrge to see if they could fix it some passer-by cleaned out the car of everything in it.

Then I parked it in an underground hotel carpark in Zurich, and someone nicked the alloy wheel centres during the night. So I rented a parking place in a locked garage and someone broke into the garage levered the drivers-side windoe open and stole the front panel of my Radio/CD player. Not the actual machine, just the completely-useless-without-the-player front-panel.

So I have come across morons and waste-of-life scum in three different countries all trying to nick my car or parts of it, and the reason I bought it was because I could afford to leave it at the side of the road if I had to leave the country on short notice.

[Clstrphbc_donut]

So why was mine the only car in the street that crooks tried to break into last night?

is usually parked under a tree

I think you answered your own question.

You left it under a tree making it more difficult for the thieves to be seen. Park it under a street light and they'll glow up like a lightbulb which may deter them.

[Brucelles]

These are 240 year-old beech trees, they are way taller than the street lights. Anyway I saw them last night and they were pretty obvious, they are obviously really poor thieves. The good news is that the two guys, both fit and bigger than I am, ran off rather than just kicking the crap out of me.

As my dad says, they should be thrown back into the sea to evolve a bit more.

[acrobat]

Are the police not doing anything then?

My arl fellas house was victimised some years back, and it got so bad that CID installed a hidden video camera. It cought the bloke doing all the damage and robbing stuff. They came and picked up the tape and arrested him and that was the last of it.

You could consider doing that yourself maybe. If you have a video camera, and you can hide it somewhere that will get their faces, and yet not be seen (or get rained on etc..), that would surely motivate the police. And if you don't have a camera, you might be able to buy one. I know you can buy cheap webcams for about £10. They might not be good enough, but maybe for £20 or £30 or something.. you might get a camera good enough to identify them.

[Rave]

I've never had my car broken into. But in Mid-July, I scooted into a kerb in the centre of Catford at 6.45pm to pick up a mate. The kerb was a bus lane, so before stopping I made damnably sure there were no busses, taxis or bikes incoming. Stopped for 5 seconds, mate got in, and I was away without inconveniencing anybody at all.

Over a month later, a fine from TfL for £120 landed on my doormat. Someone had gone through the CCTV cameras a month after the fact and decided to screw me.

I don't like to crap your thread Brucelles, because you might be one of those people who thinks that any breaking of the rules, even if it inconveniences nobody, should be punished to the full extent of the law. There are a bunch of them on MSE, I've discovered. If you're not though, then you might sympathise with my being stolen from for no reason.

Luckily, I have some comeback. As a London bus driver, totally against the advice of my employer and my union, I used to insist that my passengers had valid tickets. I've been assauted a couple of times for my trouble, but I made an average of £4 a day from people who reluctantly coughed up when challenged. Well, no more. TfL are going to lose far more than £120 as a result of this sorry episode.

And I'm going to campaign for Boris, I think.

[Brucelles]

Rules are for the obedience of the ignorant and for the guidance of the wise.