Tales of getting Robbed/Mugged/Jacked

it's october 2001. everyone's freaked out about the trade center attacks, but i have a ticket to amsterdam and by god i'm going to use it even though my 2 best friends that had signed on to join me beg off. i make the flight intact but with a nice respiratory infection as MY passenger.

anyway, i remain undaunted and despite a fever and coughing up radioactive crap, i forge on with my amsterdam experience from top to bottom, museums to coffee shops. i have a great week even though i'm stag.

fast forward to the end of the week and i take a trip out to the ape hill (i forget the dutch translation). it's a monkey zoo. pretty cool. orango's, gibbons, chimps etc. in one part they let a bunch of little spider monkeys run rampant and you can pet them and feed them. i was so caught up in this i didn't see the little signs that picto-warned me to keep my zippers tight. and sure enough one of the little pissant monkeys gets in my backpack pocket and makes off with my train ticket!!!

that got sorted easy enough though and it's NOT my main part of this tale. i get onto my train and as planned go from holland down to italy. it takes about 22 hours and i'm still very sick and get very little sleep. in fact almost none. i'm delirious. in spite of this though i successfully meet up with my mom, my sister, and her friend and we're off to the little villa in the country outside florence we rented. yay!

it's a gorgeous old 2 story spanish (or italian in this case i suppose) house. nice tile floors, great kitchen and views; the works. so we all get into our rooms and i proceed to fall into the deepest slumber of my life barring going under for surgery.

i wake up to a scream i'll never forget. it's my mom and she's absolutely mortified. i go downstairs and where our rental car was is a pile of papers thrown out. it turns out my mom and company were almost as tired as me from their flight. so not only is the car gone, but the villa is picked clean of our wallets, my cd walkman and case (im surprised they went after that) and our passports.

at that point we were all ready to get back to the states. it was a big hassle because in italy everyone takes a 2 hour break in the afternoon called siesta and they're not coordinated, so we were running into issues where the embassy kept different hours than the passport photo place and what would have taken a day here in l.a. took 3 there.

all in all, i think we're lucky we got to sleep through it. i haven't been in a fight in years but i definitely respond fight before flight and i would have possibly got hurt going after the guys in our villa if they outnumbered me.

anyway, thats my one getting robbed story and now i'd like to hear yours.

 

I have a barbaric state-sanctioned concealed carry permit, occasionally tote a baby-slaying evil black handgun w/ cop-killer boolits and have all these wild cowboy-cop-soldier-ninja hero fantasies about stopping rapists, rampage shooters and minorities.

Nothing bad will ever happen to me.​

/mandatory masturbation

...

Like many middle class white guys here in the US, I've never been the victim of a burglary, robbery or any other crime. I have good physical security habits and excellent insurance. I'm more likely to lose my property due to a fire or other natural disaster.

 

Fours years ago this coming January my father had aorta aneurysm repair surgery at Methodist hospital in Indianapolis. Loooong day, my brother and I head out to a friends house for the night. My sister stays at the hospital in the family lounge. She slept in a recliner. At some point that night someone rifled through her purse and stoled her wallet as she slept.