Oxygen Thieves

TUESDAY, JUNE 22, 2010


Oxygen Thieves

In life there are some that shouldn’t even breathe.

Today I am more than a little bit angry. Not that it ever does much good but sometimes it is good to vent, to get it out of our systems.


I wish DakotaDawg was visiting some friends home while they were working yesterday because their kitties were not quite threatening enough to keep a thief out of their house.

They lost a lot of personal things that have a value that could never be calculated by Actuarial Science. St. Jude has been called in to help in what may be a hopeless cause. I am trying to locate Sister Mediatrix to see if she will throw up a prayer too.

DakotaDawg did start lighting up from her post on the lateral file yesterday afternoon. I went to the front of the house to investigate and saw a young guy turning the corner at the driveway hustling away down the street at a pretty good clip. He wasn’t pushing a lawn mower. At the time I thought very little of it. We have people coming to the house all the time trying to hand us political literature, sell us magazine subscriptions or get us to sign some petition or the other.

We live pretty near our friends. I am going to look at these folks a lot more critically now because it is not as if I have not been a victim myself a few times in the past.


Many years ago someone broke into an apartment where I was living and stole some things from downstairs including car keys, my money clip and the valuables left in plain sight. He counted among these a brand new pair of my Red Wing boots. I couldn’t then and still don’t understand why a burglar wanted a pair of someone else’s boots. My little poodle and I slept upstairs through the entire break in. The police caught that guy. He had worn my boots for enough time that when I finally got them back, eight months after the robbery, I really did not want them. I gave them to Goodwill.

Another time some guy broke into the screened porch behind another apartment where I lived. He stole an old locked up steamer trunk. He didn’t get much. However, a lot of personal things that had no value at all except to me were missing. I wonder where in the heck my junior year high school yearbook and those old desert bucks are now.

Once somebody climbed over the fence at my shop and stole a bunch of things from my boat including my anchor and line. He got some fishing rods, a tackle box that I had fishing lures my grandfather used to use, a pair of rubber boots and my electronics. I was pretty angry then but one of the electronic devices was his ultimate downfall: my EPIRB or EMERGENCY POSITION INDICATING RADIO BEACON. This unit was to be activated in case the boat sank.

This oxygen thief sold the EPIRB to a fellow that bought things he knew were hot for a few bucks with the hope he could turn them for a big profit. The second oxygen thief did not understand what an EPRIB was. He most certainly did not know how it worked. He turned it on to see what it would do. The Coast Guard sent the Sheriff to find out why the device was sending out an emergency signal from downtown instead of the Gulf of Mexico.

When the deputy got there he had the guy with the goods… the EPIRB did its job. It saved me in a hopeless situation, much like St. Jude. The fence rolled quickly on the thief who was then arrested, prosecuted and convicted. The one that stole the stuff got seven years plus restitution for the items he sold that I never recovered. The second guy got let off the hook for cooperating.

I got a notification from the State Attorney letting me know the thief was being released for good behavior two years from being sent up river. As a condition of his parole he had to make restitution or he would go back to jail. That was twenty years ago. I told the State Attorney I never got any checks or my rubber boots. I am still waiting for them. He did go back to jail but it was not for forgetting to send me the money… he got caught again after another burglary.

Another time I was doing a frame off renovation of a Toyota Land Cruiser. I had it stripped down to the bare frame and everything was sandblasted and freshly painted. The frame was sitting behind my shop. It had a brand new set of fancy rims with brand new huge tires that still had the rubber nubbies on them. I only left it out over the weekend because we needed space inside the shop for political signs we were silk-screening.

On Monday when I went out behind the shop the frame was sitting on the ground. The brand new tires and rims were not there. The police gave up looking for them. I didn’t. I guessed that a high school kid took the tires so I checked all the high school parking lots looking for those extra wide tires and fancy rims. Toyota six lug rims also fit Chevy pick up trucks. I finally found the rims in a parking lot at the high school in the county south of where I live on a Chevy. I notified the Sheriff of the tag number and VIN of the truck that was wearing my shoes and they arrested the boy that nite. I did get restitution because I went to lunch with the boy’s dad and explained that he could do the punishment or his boy could have a record: his choice. No matter what, I was getting four brand new tires and rims. The dad paid up. The boy paid his dad back and turned into a pretty decent human being.

Four other times I had burglaries at my sign shop. It was in one of those neighborhoods where connoisseurs of cheap drugs frequent. Once they stole my tools out of my truck by breaking the storage doors off. The other times they just broke into the building one way or another. It did not matter whether I had an electronic burglary alarm monitoring service or not. Thieves can always get in when they want to badly enough. In and out so fast they were gone before the police could get to the scene. In the worst break in the oxygen thief stole my computers and found the portable hard drives where I had all the data backed up. Keeping the back up media where the computers were may not have been one of my best strategies. Fortunately, I had a second back up set of CD’s at the house so I did not lose too much. This was back in the days of Megabytes before the advent of Gigabytes.


At our house we are now going to rent a safety deposit box to put some of our really treasured things in it. Some things can never be replaced; things like my friends lost. We are also going to do all of the things we started to do but never completed. Things like a complete inventory of everything worthwhile in the house with digital pictures, serial numbers, etc. We are going to keep this information in several places including on the Cloud.


After that last shop burglary I decided to get the DakotaDawg. Her first test came after I had her for less than a month. She was sleeping in the back of the Land Cruiser when I ran in to grab one more Christmas present for someone special. I had a new pair of shoes for myself in a bag on the floor in the front seat and a DVD of bird calls for someone else. Those shoes were pretty weird looking Bjorn mules.

When I got back to the vehicle, DakotaDawg was standing in the back where she had been napping with her hackles up. She was barking. It was a FAIL and too little too late. She must have gone on guard just in time though because on the transmission hump was my fancy digital camera still in its bag. DakotaDawg and I had a long discussion in Hochdeutsch about exactly what her responsibilities are. I learned my lesson. DakotaDawg never stays in the truck while I run in for one more thing. I also lock the doors no matter how little time I am going to be away from my car.

I can’t figure out what it is about these crooks and my shoes.

I am not trying to make light of this problem… there are just too many people in the world that are wasting our oxygen. Many other friends have had break ins of their residences or vehicles. They lost valuable things. Few recovered what was taken.

DakotaDawg now takes her protection duties seriously. We all need to start doing this a little better for each other. If I see someone else leaving the driveway in sort of a hurry when DakotaDawg lets me know she was not pleased about the visit I am going to call Law Enforcement and my neighbors.


That darned bug man and the mail lady better watch out.


I am really hoping that when one of those computers taken in the most recent robbery logs on to the internet that it calls home. If this is not happening for every log on, it sure ought to be!

I am kind of an old curmudgeon and I used to make signs. I might start making a few that say: “You better not be in this yard unless we knew in advance you were coming. DakotaDawg is watching you!”

And: Since their personal treasures and computers don’t have EPIRB’s… Jude, please help my friends in their hour of need. Let justice triumph over all Oxygen Thieves… “I PROMISE you, 0 blessed Saint Jude, to be ever mindful of this great favor and I will never cease to honor you as my special and powerful patron and to do all in my power to encourage devotion to you.

Amen.”

http://www.op-stjoseph.org/advance/devotions.htm#Jude Prayer - Prayer to Saint Jude Thaddeus

Besides I can't afford to lose any more shoes.

Thank God for DakotaDawg and St. Jude.
© 06.22.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg