I hate people who break into cars. My first experience with this was back in 1992. I used to park my car in the Brewery District in a gravel lot. On Thanksgiving Day, I was at my mom's house and I went to my car to get something out of the trunk...and found that the lock had been smashed in. The next Monday, when I parked back at the gravel lot, I saw that most every car in that lot had similar damage. The only thing I had in the trunk was a cheap tool kit; it was gone. $300 damage to my car and just so the moron could steal a $10 toolkit.
Then I moved to St. Thomas. I lost track of the number of times my car got broken into. I would never leave anything in it. One morning I came out to my Suzuki Samurai hardtop and found the driver's door BENT OPEN. The moron had used a screwdriver to pry the top of the door open, then bent the whole door over. Sad thing is, there was absolutely nothing in the car...not a radio (not even a center console; I had taken it out). The door was so screwed up I eventually had to replace it (I found a door in Columbus and shipped it back as checked luggage on a flight).
In 1998 I was parked in the Short North and some fool smashed in the front passenger window of my 1988 Camry; they stole everything in the glove box and under the armrest...but MISSED the brand new Minolta SLR camera that was resting under a big, floppy, hat on the rear seat.
Ahhhhh....but I got a little revenge. Between 1999 and 2000 I worked as an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney up in Delaware County. On my last week on the job, I was handling a case in juvenile court involving a 16 year old kid who was helping a friend break into cars and steal the stereos out of them. He was caught by an alert owner, but not before his partner in crime ran off with the car stereo and about 50 CDs that had been in a case in the car. I had charged the little perp with a variety of crimes including felony theft (since the total value of the radio and CDs was over $500). The perp's lawyer wanted me to have some pity on the kid and set the value of the stolen goods at under $500 so that it would not be a felony. No deal. There are plenty of people who suffer serious setbacks in their lives and they don't go breaking into cars to steal things.
The truth is, I will never know who broke into my cars...but I felt justified in blaming that kid because it was probably someone with the same motives. I generally not the kind of person to go for revenge. It is a waste of time and effort. You are better off putting the energy into making yourself better. But, in some rare cases, I am willing to try a little vengeance. The "revenge" has to be legal, moral, and not a waste of my time and effort. Being hard on that little perp was all of the above.
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Launched in August 2010, TheMetropreneur.com is a local online resource devoted to small business development and entrepreneurship. Its aim is to tell the stories of Central Ohio's business community, foster regional economic development and assist entrepreneurs with its resource-heavy focus.