Robbed

A little over a week and a half ago, my husband and I went to an Alice in Chains concert. The show was great, and I was pleasantly surprised at how awesome the new lead singer is. We thoroughly enjoyed the concert… up until we turned around to pick up our stuff (my purse and both of our sweatshirts) from under my chair. It was gone. All of it. It was 35 degrees outside and we were both without jackets. My purse had both of our cellphones, my keys, our checkbook, and my wallet in it. Inside my wallet were the following items: debit & credit cards, all of our bank account numbers, my Social Security card (yes, I KNOW you’re not supposed to carry it with you), my discount card for work, photos of my friends and family, as well as some other random tidbits. “Well,” we thought at first, “maybe these assholes just took the purse and ditched it when they realized there was no cash in it.” No such luck. We checked the trashcans & lost and found to no avail. After about 2 hours of futile searching, we decided to call it quits and go home. Fortunately, my husband’s friend was with us, so we used his phone to call and cancel my debit card. Also fortunately, my husband had not put the key to his car (which we drove to the concert) in my purse. However, he had not brought his house keys with him, so when we arrived at out apartment at midnight, we had to call a locksmith to let us in. This cost us $60.

I was scheduled to work the next day, but I had to call out so we could get all of our bank accounts closed, credit cards canceled, and I could get a new driver’s license. Because I couldn’t go to work, that cost us another $70. It cost me $8 to get a new license. (Our running total is now up to $138.) We both had insurance on our phones, but it still cost us $30 and $50 respectively for the deductible on each phone. Also, we had to purchase a MagicJack ($40) because we had no access to cellphones the day after it happened (the insurance company overnights them to you), so we couldn’t cancel the credit cards and whatnot until late that afternoon. We are now at $258 that this incident has cost us. That is not including the cost of gas for going to the bank, the DMV, and other various places we had to go to get these things straightened out. It is also not counting the money that I would have saved on things I needed to buy by using the discount card they stole. I had to cancel it so they couldn’t use it. All told, I would say these bastards cost us about $300-$350. We saw how much they charged on the credit and debit cards before we got a chance to cancel them, and it was nowhere near that much.

This concert was supposed to be a “fan appreciation show” to make up for a rained-out concert we went to in September. The really grand thing about that situation is that it rained unbelievably hard that night, and the radio station that put on the show refused to make an announcement about whether Mudvayne and Alice in Chains would still go on. Our tickets said “rain or shine” so we and hundreds of other people stood in the pouring rain for 4 hours waiting to hear some sort of news. The total cost of this concert was about $430. We each paid $40 for a ticket ($80), plus $15 for parking for two cars because it was an all-day show and my husband couldn’t come until he got off from work ($30), the gas to drive to Nashville in 2 cars ($20), $50 for the deductible on my husband’s waterlogged Blackberry and $250 to buy me a new phone because I didn’t have insurance on my Samsung flip phone ($300 total for both phones). The grand total for both concerts? Between $730 and $780.

What really irks me about all this, aside from the invasion of my privacy, the theft of my belongings and my identity, the fact that this dimmed my view of humanity & rock concerts, and the absolute feeling of vulnerability that I’m going to endure for the rest of my life because they have my Social Security card, is that my husband was scheduled to deploy exactly one week after this debacle happened. Instead of spending quality time together doing fun things, we had to spend his last week in the States on the phone with banks and credit card companies, visiting the Social Security office & DMV, and panicking about whether or not these people were going to try and buy a yacht under my name. They not only robbed me of my belongings and my money, they robbed me of precious time with my husband. I’m not going to see the man for another 6 months (and then only for 2 weeks before he leaves again for another 6 months), and our most recent memories of spending time together involve us doing damage control on our bank accounts & credit scores.

Do me a favor, world: If you’re going to steal someone’s stuff… don’t. Just don’t. And if you see a girl in a Canada hoody walking with a boy in a Mindgame hoody with a broken zipper, knock them down, take their stuff, and give me a call, would you?