No, seriously. I don’t.
Before we moved I’d very little experience with criminal activity*. When I was 14 someone broke into Rebecca’s garage and stole the tools** (but thankfully not Rebecca), and someone once broke into Nina (my old VW Golf) stealing nothing but permanently damaging the back door. And I suppose in Slough someone removed the scrap batteries from the drive at the front of the house, which is not surprising, but was faintly annoying.
But since we’ve moved here we’ve had:
– Greenhouse stolen from a property from which we were going to go and collect it.
– Sofa collected by company who claim to still be trading but aren’t and have disappeared with our property – the owners have also disappeared and their premises have been repossessed (and were apparently empty when repossessed) thus making them very hard to trace. Still not sure what to do about that.
– Break-in to our garage
And today I found out that the table saw we’d bought (nice old 1960’s stanley bridges mini-beast) has been stolen from whence it was to be collected. This is upsetting for multiple reasons: it means that the cunning ‘two items collected on one collection fee’ trick may not work – I’m not quite sure what the courier company are going to say. They went there, and rang saying “the saw’s not there” apparently. The saw was very cheap for what it was – it needed a replacement power switch, which didn’t bother me, but did put off everyone else, it seems. And of course, now I need to find another alternative – and finding something of similarly good quality without paying a ridiculous price is going to be difficult.
I’m vaguely contemplating that maybe we should mark up the stuff and rent a saw, because the crappy arse tools that I can afford in the table saw area are a world more crappy than the tools I can justify/afford in the smaller power tools area :(
* I’m not counting here a certain Morris Minor company who’s activity I’d regard as criminal, but who get of scot free because the laws in this country are ridiculous.
** Something which makes me sad to this day, because my dad’d given me a set of tools that he’d had as a kid – and a massive new toolbox rammed full with nice spanners and socket sets, etc.
