Recovery

The events of last Monday significantly disrupted my life.

Today my new CO driver’s license came in the mail. I feel like a person again. There were several items that I could not replace without photo ID. My bank card came quickly. I use cash for 99% of my transactions and felt truly naked and vulnerable without some cash in my pocket. Six days of no cash left me feeling pretty shaky. I had a credit card that was not stolen that I used during this past week but I normally only shop with an actual credit card when I want the built in warranty/insurance of the card. I remain mystified by the $2 transaction for coffee. Yes, I did it. OK and I admit it was faster than cash. But, it was strange.

I am slowly replacing everything that was taken. I upgraded to the BlackBerry Curve 8310 within about 24 hours. The new toy is RED and has built in GPS and many other features I have yet to explore. I am thinking about insuring this one for loss just in case something like this happens again. The new toy is also password protected. This makes me feel more safe, with better data security.  I have mixed feelings about my better protections. It was the lack of protection that allowed the police to get the name of the thief.

Yep, that’s right, I have his name. I’ll back up. My office is under video surveillance. I did not know this when I first realized my purse was taken. Our building manager pulled the video and made us a DVD recording. A single person entered my office while I was blithely microwaving my dinner. He was on and off our floor in one minute. I was at the microwave for two. He was in and out of our building in under 4 minutes. My urge to put him on YouTube is strong. Because my BlackBerry was not password protected, he was able to use it to make numerous calls before I canceled the service about 90 minutes after it was taken. One of the people called was willing to identify the caller. He also used one of my credit cards for a purchase under $5 before I was able to cancel the card.

Amazingly, although the total loss of items was under $500, the detective assigned to my case, Norman, has been actively following up on evidence and communicating with me regularly. Thank you Norman.  First he picked up the DVD and my phone records. Soon he was able to provide me a name. Luckily, not a student, not a coworker. We suspected this internally because none of us recognized the person on the video but it was nice to be sure. Norman followed up on the phone numbers and convinced one of the people to identify the thief. They’d met in jail. Norman is trying to build a very solid case for the DA’s office so now he’s asked me to track down that small charge made on my credit card. He is really following up all of the leads.

We’ll see. The dollar amount puts this solidly in the slap on the wrist misdemeanor category. No one was physically harmed or threatened. I was pretty dumb for leaving my office unlocked. But, it would be really nice if the person did not have the opportunity to do this to others. There should be some justice, some penalty for breaking the rules of our society. But should it cost more in tax payer dollars to get justice than was taken from me? It is here that I struggle.