onotob

I didn’t realize I was without my bag until we were about to leave. Dave and Buster’s is very loud and very bright, and with a pretty good buzz going the dread came on slowly. It’s not by the Nascar game. Not by the snowmobile racer either. Nada at the go-carts.

The inventory started running through my head:

• 20GB iPod with 3GB free
• Palm Vx PDA
• Folding keyboard for Palm Vx
• 2 Nokia 5165 cellular phones: one work, one personal
• 2 CDs: Tori Amos’ Scarlet’s Walk and Juno Reactor’s Beyond the Infinite
• ID for work. I will be charged $50 if it ends up missing.
• Checkbook with ~40 blank checks

So I call the phones. They both go straight to voicemail. No rings. I leave a nasty message in the hopes that the thief will listen and be shamed into returning my belongings. Short fantasies run through my head. I’m beating them up in this one, yelling at them in that one. Tom checks the bathroom.

In his hands is my delfated, defeated sachel, emptied of everything except photos of my ex-girlfriend some credit card statements. They took the fucking badge. Maybe they wanted the little retractable device. Maybe they also have to wear their ID around their neck and scan the card to get to their cubicle every morning. It can be a pain in the ass without one of those little things. What are they called, anyway? Whatever. Assholes.

I’m impressed by the response time of the police, and give the officer all the details with little hope of seeing any of it again. The next morning I retrieve the iPod’s serial number from the registry of my Windows XP machine at home and call to update the police report. Maybe these guys aren’t geeks and will try to pawn the stuff. You have to show ID to pawn anything these days, but not in some of the shops on the south side. I wonder how much of my music they will enjoy if they decide to keep the iPod.

So in the end how do you feel? A little violated, but it was all just stuff. I had 250 CDs stolen a few years ago and that hurt. All this is easily, if not cheaply, replaced. Mostly I feel foolish. Why the hell was I carrying that damn thing around an arcade in the first place? Why didn’t I leave it Tom’s car?

So how do we remedy this situation, soothe these mental bruises? We drop $600 on a Dell Axim with a 512MB CompactFlash card.

God bless America.

Posted at 1:58 pm.