Just Can't Catch A Break

Thu 03 February 2011

Okay, so mid-December last year I got into a car accident. Nothing major, nobody was hurt. I thought the other guy would be found at fault since he didn't have a license at the time of the accident, but apparently not. I get a citation, but it gets thrown out in court, so I'm not out anything but apparently I'll have to pay out of pocket to get my car fixed. So you'd think that's pretty much the end of that, right? That's enough bad luck for the next five or so years, right?

I thought so too, until I got home last night. I normally enter through the garage, since the front door latch bolt doesn't work. I came in the house behind my mom so when I notice the front door slightly ajar I'm more curious than concerned.

"Did you open the front door?" I yell out to her, as she went back into the garage.

"No, is it open?" She yells back. Now the gears are starting to turn in my head, and I slump my shoulders as I go to turn on the entryway light. Hey, wasn't there some drywall or wood or something in front of the deadbolt? There's typically trim all around the doorway, isn't there? Oh great, the door's been kicked in.

It's around this time that my mom came in from the garage to see what I've been trying to work out for the past 30 seconds or so. What I thought was a sliver of light that led me to ask if my mom had opened the door was actually the piece of trim that had, until about 45 minutes before we got home, been attached to the door, along with some detritus that composed the rest of what was the lockset of the front door.

I run upstairs to the TV room where I realize that yes, they had stolen the TV. I run into my room, which looked slightly more disheveled than normal, but apparently had everything accounted for, including all of my checks. My mom goes into her room and finds that they had stolen her laptop (which was six or so years old at the time, with a dead battery but they left the AC cord).

We go through the rest of the house looking for things they might have stolen, but it's all still there. We call the cops and give them the serial numbers for the things that were stolen, and since my mom has homeowner's insurance  we should get reimbursed for the repairs and the stolen items, but it's the fact of the matter that they were there only 45 minutes before is. And if it was a normal day it would have been 15 minutes.

And the neighbors saw them! Not well enough to accurately describe them to the police, but they saw a car just idling in front of our house and didn't wonder who they might have been. I don't really blame them for that, since we had been in a lot of rental cars in the not-too-distant past, but I wish one of them had at least gotten the license plate number or something.

*sigh* I can't think of a way to wrap this post up, so I'll just say that I'm hoping my mom's insurance will reimburse us for some security upgrades I have planned.