Grrrrrr, my camera was stolen!

Well what was becoming a really nice weekend had a major letdown on the realization that my camera had been stolen. Even worse - I have no clue when or where it happened. #&%*(#@ !

Sadly this was due to some poor coincidences and lack of memory power by yours truly. Two weeks ago I took my camera with me to the Corniche to take some pictures, then put it in my glove compartment when I went to the mall. Then for some reason I thought I had taken the camera out of the glove compartment later that evening and brought it back into the apartment.

Fast forward two weeks: yesterday I'm looking around my apartment for my camera as I wanted to take some pictures of some stuff downtown. Not finding it, I went "oh yeah, I must have left it in the glove compartment of my car!" Went down to my car and found . . . a completely empty glove compartment. Even my car manuals that I keep in there were gone, which was a sure sign that something had happened and not that I was being forgetful about the camera.

Now this confused me. My car had automatic locking - you know, where you press a button on your key chain, the car lights briefly and makes a "chirp-chirp" noise. And I didn't have a broken window, so how did someone get into the car?

So I stepped a couple of feet away from the car, and clicked the autolock.
"chirp, chirp", lights flash, doors lock -- then immediately unlock, like the locks were on a spring!

I tried again, pressed the button, doors lock -- then unlock.

What the hell!?! Tried a few more times, and same result each time. My autolock was busted and was sending both the lock & unlock signal at the same time. And since I was always walking away from the car when I "locked" it, and always far away when I unlocked it, I never noticed. Primarily because the car would flash and chirp like everything is fine. How long it has been like that I have no idea.

So for at least the past two weeks I've been leaving my car in various parking lots and streets completely unlocked with a camera in it. Talk about tempting fate. So of course I have no clue when someone rifled through my car. In the last two weeks my car has been parked at the Corniche, the Souqs, the docks for that dhow trip, various malls, hotels, at the school where I have Arabic class, and so forth. It could have happened anywhere.

So I'm a little upset at this but really it was only a matter of time I guess. I had been thinking about getting a new camera anyway (mine was 5 years old and was bottom-of-the-line even back then) but this still irks me. I hate being the victim of petty theft. I hope the thief chokes on it. At least since it's an old camera he probably won't get a lot for it, not that he had to do much work for it.

Grrrrrr, what a letdown to the day.