Words of comfort / Ernest Burgle

I've always held the belief that stupid people carry the unique ability to add a much needed dose of absurdity to otherwise tense and dire situations.

My wife came home from work yesterday to find that our apartment had been burglarized.

The bad guy made off with some jewelry, my change jar, a whole slew of CDs, and our safe deposit box which held birth certificates, social security cards, passports, two credit cards, and a respectable collection of basketball and football trading cards circa 1985 - 1992. The jewelry wasn't anything to sweat over (so says my wife), the change was spare, the CDs had already been rendered useless after burning onto iTunes, and all the IDs can eventually be replaced. The only real stinger was the football and basketball cards. While they admittedly haven't proven to be a viable investment they did represent a good chunk of my childhood. What's this asshole going to do with 37 Bo Jackson cards? He probably doesn't even know who Hakeen Olajuwon is.

But I digress.

It could have been a lot worse. Among the items left untouched were my laptop, camcorder, digital camera, stereo, iPod, DVD collection, and television. They were all in the living room. The bad guy never bothered to open the door to the living room. Kaizer was in the living room. Evidentially he knew better than to risk messing with an 80 lb boxer. For a guy with $50 worth of spare change in his pockets he showed remarkable resolve.

There were no obvious signs of forced entry but I have no doubt that when I left that morning I remembered to "lock" the door. To call the contraption on our front door a lock is a stretch. Any two-bit criminal with a credit card could pop it open as fast as you or I could open a can of soda. We'd mentioned the shoddy lock to our landlord before and he'd made equally shoddy promises to replace it with something more robust. He never got around to swapping it for a dead bolt and I never got around to reminding him.

After my wife got off the phone with the police she called the landlord. She told him what had happened and demanded that the lock be replaced that night. He offered to call a locksmith and wanted to know of any of the other tenants had seen anyone suspicious. My wife did not know. The landlord then asked if the super had noticed any strange people in the building. My wife did not know. He next asked if our dog was home at the time. My wife said that he was. Then came the final question - the natural follow-up to the current string of inquiries. A simple question from a moron that gave my wife momentary relief from the sick feeling of being violated and allowed me to better bear with the parting of my Lew Alcindor rookie card.

"Did the dog see anything?"

zeroth life lesson: thank the lord for the idiot's loose tongue for they make the seemingly tragic suddenly tolerable.