That Was Unsettling

I was at work this morning, and I got a call on my cell phone.  I didn't recognize the number, it wasn't a local call, so I had it send the message that I couldn't talk right now.  

Immediately I get  text back claiming that it is FedEx, and asking if I am home.  

This does not seem right, and it is kind of creepy.  

First, I have never had FedEx try to call me or ask if I am home for a delivery.  They either leave the item or leave a note saying they tried to deliver.  

Secondly, I am not expecting any deliveries.  I haven't ordered anything.  I also assume that anyone who was sending something so valuable that it needed a signature would have told me to expect it.

So I did a Google search of the phone number.  If it is legitimately Federal Express trying to contact me then it should be registered to them.  Nope.  Comes up as a mobile phone.

No way am I going to answer that text.  You can freaking wonder whether I am at home or not.  If it is really FedEx then they can leave the note that I missed my package.

I did, however, text my friend (and neighbor) who lives down the street to ask her to keep an eye on my house if she was home.  Coincidentally, my neighbor across the street also stopped into work, and I told her about the weird call as well.

You might be wondering why I got so freaked out over what appears to be either an innocent call or a phishing scam.

I was away on vacation last week, but I had various people stopping by the house to take care of the cats, and I had told my friend down the street that I would be away, just in case anything happened.  I was going to be gone during Halloween and Mischief Night -- better to be safe than sorry, in my opinion.

On Sunday, when I was home again, I noticed that a couple of the pumpkins I had left out as decorations were missing.  I didn't think anything of it.  A storm had blown through while I was gone, and they were just foam pumpkins, so I assumed they had just blown away.  It was a bummer, but not a tragic loss. 

On Monday, as I was getting ready to leave for work, I saw my friend down the street.  We stopped to chat and she told me that someone had broken into the house across the street from mine while I was on vacation.  Apparently they smashed a window in the middle of the day, brazen as anything.  The police had come around asking if anyone had seen or heard anything.

Now that you have the whole back-story, you can understand how getting a random message at work asking if I am at home might have freaked me out a bit.  For all I knew this person was sitting outside of my house, casing the place.  I think they would be mighty disappointed though, unless they are in the market for a big-ass, heavy as hell, standard television that won't let you watch many television shows.

My house is just fine, in case you are wondering. I'm home now, and if anyone starts acting creepy outside my house I will be calling the police.

The Case of the Disappearing Bike

Bikes have a long and sordid history at my place of work.   You would think a simple bike -- or the bike rack it is locked to -- would not be that exciting.

We've had stolen community bikes from Vassar College that were left at the library for days.  No one knew it was stolen.  Everyone assumed that there was a student in the building at the time, and they had ridden it over.

There was also a guy who stole a bike from the rack outside the library.  The teenage girl it belonged to, and her family, were obviously very upset.  They called the police and reported it stolen, as anyone would do.  Do you know how they got it back?  The jerk who stole it was dumb enough to ride it back to the library.  Not the brightest move, riding it back to the scene of the crime. 

Then there was the time the entire bike rack got stolen.  Oh yeah.  I'm sure it gives everyone a feeling that their bike is completely safe when the thing they are locking it onto gets boosted.  We had it on the security video, too, but not a good enough shot to identify the people.  Two creative guys with skateboards propped it on their boards, one under each end, and rolled it into the middle of the parking lot.  They did it right in the middle of the afternoon on a day we were closed, brazen as anything.  We watched the video and saw one guy face-plant after trying to do a trick on it.  It was a patron who used the bike rack who discovered that it was stashed behind the fence of the house down the street -- you could see it from an angle when walking by the property.  We got it back, and it is now secured so that it can't be stolen again.

There have been other bikes that were stolen.  One guy actually had his bike lock stolen, but they left the bike.  I still don't get that rationale on that one.

The latest incident, however, gets the prize for the weirdest bike-related thing I have ever seen.  I'm calling it The Case of the Disappearing Bike.

For the last couple of  weeks there has been a bike locked to the bike rack at work.  I assumed someone had ridden over and then either the weather got bad, or they had too much to carry, and they decided to leave it and come back for it later.  I wouldn't leave anything I valued there for a prolonged period of time, but people tend to think libraries are safe places where nothing ever happens.

Last week I noticed that the seat was missing.  Strange, but not really that strange.  I couldn't remember if the seat had really been there before.  There are people who take off the seat when they lock their bikes up to make it less attractive to thieves.

Saturday I noticed that as well as the seat being missing, the rear tire had now also disappeared.  Is there a really creative thief who is slowly stealing the bike piece by piece and rebuilding it at home?  He (or she) took the seat first, and when no one came back for the bike they decided to take a tire?

Today the handlebars were also missing.  WTF?!  It's like the bike is slowly being mined for parts.  Are multiple people just taking the parts that they want?  Where is the owner of this thing, cause they are going to be pissed when they see what is left.

 Picture by me!

That's what the bike looked like today.  No tire, no seat, no handlebars.  Just a sad half-bike left to wait in the rack.

Another picture by me!

You can see that they took the tire, but left the chain.  Parts are bent.  I'm not sure if that is a cut brake line, or the actual bike lock that is laying on the ground.

Final picture by me!

It looks so weird without a seat and handlebars.  Are the parts that are left even worth salvaging?  Someone is going to have a cow when they see what has happened to their bike!

I have the day off tomorrow, but  I am really curious to see what is left of it when I go back to work Thursday morning.  Will the front tire be gone, leaving a few sad metal triangles lying on the ground?  Will someone have taken mercy on the bike and just have taken the whole thing, thrown it in the dumpster and put it out of its misery?

To any bicycle fans reading this: are there more parts missing that I didn't mention?   Let me know!  

Stay tuned for any updates in this case.  Maybe it will just slowly rust and form some sort of odd public art project in front of the building.

 

I knew it!

Remember the post about the dumpster drama?  Although it was amusing to recount all of the craziness surrounding the dumpster, I also mentioned that Forbes had listed this area as the 6th best place to raise a family.

I also said I thought they got it wrong.  I may have called them delusional.

Today a friend sent me a link that corroborates my feeling.

Behold!  The list of the Top 100 Most Dangerous Cities in the U.S.  (Population over 25,000).  We are number 50!  Go us!  Newburgh, which isn't too far away, is number 12.  That doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

I'll say it again: I would love to know where the folks at Forbes got their crime stats from.  My neighborhood alone gives evidence to the contrary.  It's in the post right before this -- I'm not linking you to it.  You are totally capable of clicking on it in the sidebar on your own.  I believe in you.

Sometimes a little validation feels so nice. 

Crime Spree

Every year when the weather warms up, I notice a massive increase in the number of sirens going off.  Police, fire, ambulance -- with my house being centrally located near some major roadways, I get to hear them all.

Is it simple mathematics?  Warm weather means more people are out, driving about like lunatics and getting into accidents?  I know the warm weather makes people bust out their barbeque grills, so maybe they didn't store them properly for the winter and it catches fire?  Maybe the warm weather has inspired all of the college students to have parties which are then busted for noise and/or underage drinking? I know the amount of sirens definitely increases on the weekends when the college students come back in the fall.

Could it be that there are more sinister machinations at work?  What if the criminals are getting smarter, plotting out their robberies and burglaries over the winter and just waiting to hatch their dastardly plans in the spring!

I don't really pay attention to all of the sirens going off any more -- not unless it is a really unusual number, or they sound like they are stopping on my street again.

Oh yes, I did say again.  When I bought my house I thought I was moving into a quiet, sleepy little neighborhood.  It is smack in the middle of everything, but people tend to forget we are here, since we are tucked away up a hill.  Since moving in, the house at the end of the street got busted for being a crack house, one of my neighbors got arrested for allegedly dealing drugs and running guns (according to neighborhood gossip -- I was at work and found out months later), and I found out that I share a property line with a pedophile.  The rest of my neighbors seem really awesome and nice though! 

So it isn't that I wish ill on anyone else.  I don't want anyone else to have their home catch fire, or to be in a car accident, etc.  I'm just really, really glad when it turns out to be something other than a problem on my street.