Someone broke into our place last night, or rather early this morning.
I got up sometime between 4-4:30am when Feifei stuck his whiskers in my face to wake me up because he wanted to go to the toilet. I unlocked the door to our front balcony to let him out to use his litter tray and didn't bother locking it again; the sun was rising and I knew we'd be up in a couple of hours.
When I got up at 7:30am I noticed the sliding screen door on the balcony was wide open. I shut it, figuring it must have been really windy in the last couple of hours, because occasionally it will blow open if there is an extremely strong wind. I didn't stop and think that whenever we even have a moderately strong wind the balcony chairs blow over and make a loud noise. The chairs remained upright.
Then I couldn't find Feifei. He wasn't on the bed when I got up, he wasn't on the balcony, he wasn't on his tower or on one of our chairs in the study. I started to figure he'd fallen off the balcony again, but I called him, and saw him poking his head out of the study. He looked around nervously before doing a 'belly crawl' over to me and proceeded to skulk around, sniffing the floor and looking terrified.
That's absolutely not normal for Feifei, unless there is a stranger in the place. I decided to check for my wallet. I'd left my wallet on the kitchen bench after we went to Coles yesterday evening. It wasn't there. Given that I'm sometimes a little forgetful I decided to look in all the places I might have left it. Not in any of those places either.
I woke Gam and explained that I was probably being paranoid, but...
So Gam helped me look for my wallet. Our laptop was still in the study, but to get to the study someone would have had to walk past our open bedroom door. We looked everywhere. In the bins, in every drawer, every bag, every cupboard in the place. Still no wallet. I was hoping that I'd just put it somewhere stupid and we'd find it. Sure I'd never live it down, but at least I wouldn't have lost my keycard, credit card, driver licence, medicare card, student ID, centrelink health care card (which, stupidly, contains my customer reference number)... basically every bit of access to my money and identity.
Yesterday was one month to the day that our neighbours across the road were broken into. Unfortunately for them, it was right in the middle of exams, and a wallet and a laptop were stolen.
After talking to our residential managers and looking through the entire place one more time I cancelled the credit card and keycard, and called the police to report a break-in. It seemed a bit excessive to bother reporting it to the police given how little was stolen and it was my fault for not locking the door, but I need a police report to be able to replace my student ID without charge, and there might have been other break-ins in the area, making this one relevant to their investigations.
The police came over, took down the relevant information and had a look around. Best of all they didn't make me feel like I was wasting their time with a trivial matter. They said we may get a call from their crime scenes team if they wanted to take fingerprints, but I doubt it will be worth their while. As an aside (I may have said it before) let me just say I think our local cops must be the best looking police in Australia. All the police I've ever seen in our local area are fit (no doughnut bellies), clean-cut and incredibly good looking (the women and the men). They look like they ought to be on brochures advertising a career in the police force. Spiffy.
I'd also like to say to the creepy, horrible person who broke into our place:
sucked in!
You got $8.10 and a bunch of useless cards for your efforts, along with my undying bad will. That's what you get for robbing someone who's probably poorer than you, dickhead.
I'm going to have to fork out $65 to replace my licence and go to a fair bit of trouble to replace all those cards and notify the companies who direct debit our various bills from the credit card that we will have a different card number, but I do get a sense of satisfaction out of knowing the moron won't even be able to buy a packet of cigarettes for his efforts.
The weird part about this is that if Feifei hadn't reacted in the way he did I'd have had no reason to check for my wallet, and wouldn't have noticed it missing until we next had to do some shopping.
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Gamprint
Paper used for printUPDATE: A lovely lady from 'scenes of crime' did give us a call and came around to dust for fingerprints. She didn't find anything useful on the balcony railing except for one I'd already noticed and presumed was Gam's. She took his print on a piece of paper just in case (and confirmed it was his), and was nice enough to let us keep it afterwards. The balcony door was a mass of fingerprints, none of them really useful, and the person who broke in wouldn't have had any need to touch the flat surface on the door frame anyway.
It wasn't at all like CSI, but I'm betting if she has kids they must think she has the coolest job in the world. Would have loved to get a photo of her at work (unidentifiable, obviously), but it would have been a particularly odd request for the victim of a B&E to make, so I thought better of it.
8 comments:
Ah man that sucks SO much.
We've been robbed seven times since we moved to Canberra - but only once with the house (rest were the car).
I can't stress this enough. Get house and contents insurance. Because your shiny laptop goes then they will pay for it. And as a twin set of struggling students it would be fucking hard to replace it all.
Sounds like crime has been on the rise... I guess being used to so much crime in the States, I always felt safe in Australia, even roaming at night.
Seven times in Canberra? It seemed like such a peaceful, sleepy place when I was there (and only about 3 years ago)
Sorry to hear about that Sarah. But yes, thankfully, only $8.10. I've never had anything of my own stolen (well, except for food from my lunchbox at school...and I know who did it too! But my piss-weak teachers didn't want to cause a fuss. Anyway...). But I can imagine the feeling of panic.
Did the person need to climb up far to get in?
High enough for it not to be worth their while, but low enough to be easy for someone who took it in their mind to do it. They wouldn't be able to get away with anything really heavy, put it that way.
House and contents insurance is too expensive for us, I think. On the other hand, getting robbed is too expensive too. I only hope the person didn't snoop around and decide anything is worth trying again for in the future.
Jedimerc- we live in a particularly safe area, but apparently break and enter (non-violent) is pretty common because so many students have laptops and stuff that is easy to carry away. And we're all a bit lax with security, I suppose! Muggings etc. are unheard of. I would still feel safe walking alone at any time of the day or night.
Anthony- you should have spiked your lunch with something nasty... birds-eye chillies or something!
The problem with house and contents insurance is that insurance companies will work very hard to ensure that you don't get a full replacement for whatever is stolen. It can be very time consuming and a great hassle. They will also require you (depending on your contract) that you provide a police report or similar to prove that no doors/windows were left open.
Ah. I left the door unlocked, even if only for a couple of hours... too bad if you don't live in a fortress! Better off putting the same amount of money in a high interest savings account, perhaps.
I disagree with Hayden. We got a cheque for what we lost within a week of them investigating the issue. And it's not that expensive. For students you can get 20k or 50k coverage for like $100 a year.
Or something like that. Totally worth it. Afterall we had about $2,000 worth taken and the premimum only cost us I think $150 for the year [due to the coverage we have]. So it paid for itself many times over.
It's worth investigating. Aamie is good I think. And GIO.
Yeah it does sound like it's worth looking into. But I still think Hayden's right and that insurance companies make it their job to screw people out of claims.
On the other hand, if we had another break in and something valuable got stolen I would absolutely be kicking myself for not looking into it sooner. Not that we actually have a lot of valuable stuff... which again makes me wonder if it's worth it... I do hate the idea of having to spend money just to obtain peace of mind. People should just leave each other's stuff the hell alone.
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