Oh my goodness, internet. Things have been a bit nuts in Patti town lately. First, I have to let you in on a little secret. When I wrote this post I had to intentionally leave out New York, which is where I went last weekend for a surprise party. I was ultra-paranoid about not ruining the surprise. Even though our flight was delayed for hours and we missed the big reveal by something ridiculous like 15 seconds, the party and the weekend were AWESOME. We actually stayed in Brooklyn the entire time, never venturing over to Manhattan, but whatever! We got to hang with the Lytles and Sarah Brown & Co. all at the same time, and I also got to see my Lil’ Sis who was in the neighborhood visiting some awesome friends of her own. And shopping. Miran las fotos.
So then our flight home on Sunday was smooth as silk and we get on MARTA feeling like we’re on top of the world because we’re so happy and we’re about to see our house and our dog and our bed and then suddenly: Oh shit where’s my backpack? No seriously where is it? I thought you had it. Well I thought YOU had it. Jay, it has my laptop in it. My LAPTOP!!! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I’m pretty much alternately swearing and crying nonstop for the next 2 hours as we go through the process of retracing our steps, finding it nowhere, and reporting it missing to three separate Lost-and-Founds (MARTA, Airport, and Delta).
I spent the next few sleepless nights going through a cycle of freak-outs:
- I just lost something very expensive that I use every day.
- I just lost a ton of information and data that I cannot replace, and that I do not have backed up.
- I have given away a ton of personal information, including bookmarks and stored passwords and addresses of people I care about that is now potentially in the hands of someone who can do Very Bad Things with it.
- Repeat.
By Wednesday, after daily calls to Lost & Found yielded nothing, I came to accept that I was never going to see my laptop again, and oh well. I reluctantly decided I’d just have to replace it, and Jay and I planned to hit up the Apple store on Thursday evening. We laughed about how we’d both been looking around on MARTA in case we saw my backpack somewhere, as if that were actually likely. I secretly fantasized that some miracle would happen and my backpack would just magically appear on our doorstep like nothing bad had happened.
On Thursday, the unlikely happened. After a very long day of conducting testing at work, during which my phone was off, I received two messages from a man named Stephen, a pawn shop owner. He had a laptop, and he thought it was stolen. He found my phone number in a file, and he needed to speak to me because the man who brought it into his shop and asked for $200 in exchange for the laptop was getting ready to leave. Holy shit!
Because I was temporarily unreachable, Stephen stalled by lying to the thief, saying he made some calls and found out the laptop was reported missing (we hadn’t filed a police report, thinking maybe it would turn up in Lost & Found). Eventually, the thief gave up and left. But not before allowing his license to be photocopied at the pawn shop. Stephen ended up getting in touch with Jay via Ioana, whose number he also found, and by 6:30 pm, I had my computer in my hands again. Three cheers for the perseverence and the kindness of strangers!
But that’s not quite the end of the story. The thief asked Stephen for the number of the person who reported the laptop missing, so Stephen gave him my number just to see what he would do with it. I got a call from a guy who sounded like an idiot, telling me he knew who took my laptop and he knew where it was, and could he have $200 for his troubles. I told him that I also knew where my laptop was, and I also knew who stole it, and pretty soon the police would know, too. Well, I guess life just isn’t fair, he said, which REALLY pushed my buttons, specifically the button that prompts me to tell someone off. No, life is NOT fair, not when people take things that don’t belong to them and instead of returning them to their rightful owners, they try to pawn those stolen things for money they don’t deserve. No, sir, THAT is not fair. I stopped short of telling him he was a good-for-nothing low life who can go fuck himself, but then added attempted extortion to the list of things I was going to tell the police.
I have a new hero in life, and he runs a pawn shop downtown. All’s well that ends well.