Most Valuable Items you had Stolen or Lost

Strumms

It can be valuable for sentimental reasons...Financial or both...

Mine is my Fender guitar, gorgeous to play and look at...loaned to a friend I’d known about 3-4 years, with the explicit agreement it was for a week or two, they lost their job and promptly disappeared back to the UK with my guitar....went underground, complete radio silence...home phone here disconnected and mobile switched off about a week beforehand...

happened about 14 years ago and just recently found them on Twitter... the fûckstickle 14 years later enjoying playing my guitar in the pics... value of the guitar if I remember was about IR£850.... found they owed two months rent, left the place in a heap, not just dirty, damaged carpets and furniture .... landlord was the friend of a work colleague so two of us got properly fûcked...and they left other friends hanging...

So what’s your story of unabashed miserable ripoff tomfoolery by these poxy humans... ?

Gregor Samsa

Spent a week in a rented apartment in Berlin in 2009. On the last night, it was broken into as we sat eating outside a restaurant literally just across the road. Had 4.5k worth of stuff stolen. Laptop, digital SLR camera, multiple lenses, iPod and a few other bits and pieces. Cops were out to investigate within 30 minutes, but there was never any sign of the culprits or the stuff. Apartment was on the 3rd floor, deadlocked, and there was a security code on the building door. There were marks on the door where they had forced it with a crowbar.

The laptop contained all our photos, going back 10 years - completely irreplaceable stuff. Fortunately I had purchased an external hard drive the week before we went, and had them all backed up. It would have been absolutely devastating to lose them.

As for the stuff, we didn’t have travel insurance, but our home insurance paid out without hassle. Ended up being able to buy newer versions of all the gear for the same price.

But the thing I lost that effected me the most was a small yellow pencil parer shaped like a hedgehog when I was in first class. It had a rubber for a nose. I think my aunty gave it to me and I loved it. One day it was just gone, and I was devastated. Over that year, I searched for it in the classroom many times, but never found it, and was really sad moving into second class as I’d never get to look for it again. I still think about it sometimes.

griffin100

My wife lost a pair of diamond earrings I’d gotten her. Few thousand in value. Came home from a party and she put them on the arm of the chair and went to bed. Next day couldn’t find them. We searched everywhere. We think the dog may have ate them. For days after I was checking the dogs poo for diamonds. No sign of them. We never replaced them and she still feels guilty about losing them.

Gregor Samsa

We think the dog may have ate them.

A diamond in the woof!

YellowFeather

Not lost or stolen, but some years ago when I was moving country, I put a lot of stuff in storage - actually that was a story in itself as it involved an insane run of bad luck (including a small chimney fire, as I hadn’t been home for a few months and when I lit the fire it puffed smoke over EVERYTHING on the one night of packing I had after my first flight home was cancelled, a small fall out of the attic, and the storage place closing to early for me to get there as the owner’s mother had become sick).

Anyhow, made it in the end after I found a very kind man with a van online who got the stuff and brought it to the place the next day, as I was off to my new location.

A few days later, the storage place caught fire! All gone.

I had insurance with the company (just about), as I only put in for it the day beforehand.

I was one of the lucky ones, as the cap for payouts was capped at €5,000, but some people had many tens of thousands’ worth in this place.

My stuff was not worth so much, but what I really miss is a crib which my mum had got for me the precious Christmas. It was to be a lifelong possession. Lots of photographs as well.

I hadn’t thought of it before, but maybe this is the year to buy a new crib just to keep, as it is kinda traditional that we have one in my family, and usually one passed down. This could be crib 2.0.

(I never did tell my mum about either of those fires! 😄)