I got home from work this evening and immediately noticed that something wasn’t quite right. My laptop bag was sitting in the middle of the hall floor and I knew I hadn’t left it there.
Walking into the sitting room my worst fears were realised – the TV was gone, as was my MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Kindle and of course my iMac. (Guess I’ve got a lot of Apple products – or at least I did!)
The house had been burgled!
The crazy thing is that this happened when I was actually in the country and in fact only a kilometre or so away from the house over in our offices.
So most of this evening has been spent talking to the local gardai (Irish police) and giving statements etc.,
The “funny” thing is that due to whatever way they staff the local police station the 3 gardai (police officers) who called out to me this evening were all plain clothes officers from the local drug unit. So my “experience” was added to by having 3 members of the drug squad in my sitting room this evening.
Tomorrow I should be getting a visit from other gardai, but I honestly doubt if I’ll get back any of the stolen goods. They’re probably long gone at this stage.
So tomorrow will probably involve lots of phone calls to insurance companies, gardai, landlords, lock smiths and possibly a trip to local electronics shop to get a replacement TV (the computers will have to wait and I’ll survive for now on my old MacBook Pro – assuming it doesn’t burn me too badly when it starts overheating!)
I feel quite violated. Having your home, your private space, invaded by strangers is very disturbing. I’ve lived in “high risk” locations in the past where the contents of the building were deemed to be “attractive” targets for robbers, though we always assumed that anyone coming after a bunch of Flemish paintings wouldn’t be that dangerous.
Having at least two and possibly more thieves in my personal space is uncomfortable.
So now I can add burglary to my checklist of “life experiences”
I am so sorry about your experience today, and I probbably feel exactly that your feeling now, the challenge is how your place recover the comfortability and care you again 🙂
Really an awful experience and I know exactly what you mean about the feeling of violation and intrusion in to your personal “space.”
Perhaps you can report the Kindle as stolen and Amazon can remotely wipe it? Similarly, I use Hidden on all my Macs:
http://hiddenapp.com/
All the best–
J.
My house got hit a couple of times when I was a teenager.
There’s an added creepiness factor when you’re burgled when the whole family is asleep at the time.
(Also, word of advice: you may also want to get a new toothbrush.)
Sorry to hear that.
We were burgled 6 years ago (Stillorgan Road) just while we’d popped out grocery shopping. In our innocence, we’d left the window open for the cat to get back in while we were gone.
On returning, the cat was curled up all nice and relaxed on the couch, but two laptops in the same room had walked. No mess or anything, just a faint, dusty footprint on the window the guy (it’s always men, isn’t it – the base lawbreakers!) had come in.
We weren’t crazy about being burgled but at least it was a very ‘clean’ job. We moved out not long after in part because of that, but also because the landlord slapped an extra E275pm onto the rent (hello, 2006!).
That’s a horrible experience Michele, sorry to hear about it. Hopefully the scumbags will be caught.
Michele,
Absolutely sucks to end the week with this sort of crap to deal with. Make sure you change all of your passwords for online accounts – cookies have a nasty habit of logging you into various places if they get into the primary account, although chances are they are too dumb to care and will try and flog the goods aspa. Also watch this video, and then have a think if there’s anything you can do:
http://gizmodo.com/5717309/what-happens-when-you-steal-a-hackers-computer
Paul.
Guys
Thanks for all the kind words
@James – I got on to Amazon yesterday and they were able to block the Kindle, so whoever ends up with it won’t be able to do a lot with it.
I’m going to be getting on to Apple as well, as I have the serial numbers of both the machines – not sure if they’ll be able to do much, but I would assume / hope that they have some way of blacklisting machines
I’m currently dealing with two insurance companies for claims. The business insurance *should* cover the laptops and hopefully the house contents insurance will cover everything else.
Thanks for your comments
Michele
Sorry to hear about that, Michele. I had the same thing happen about a year ago, a few days after moving into a new apartment. Gardaí showed up about 4 hours after we called them, looking around, took some forensics and then disappeared, never to be heard from again. About €5k worth of stuff stolen from MacBooks to an jewellery and even some hidden cash.
I’ve since installed Hidden App on my new MacBook.