Note To Self

I have often reminded myself about it but it only took that one time that I was careless for it to happen.

I had my laptop stolen from the boot of a car.

I should have known better.

I have been giving security briefings and reminding people to not leave their computer in their car for years. The one time that I broke that cardinal rule myself, it came back to bite me and it bit me hard. Oh, the irony of it all!

The signs were all there! I already had misgivings about taking the laptop on my recent road trip. I ended up not even using it anyway while we were away. We also had misgivings about going to Carrefour Subang Jaya that evening. On the way up from the parking lot, we received pamphlets about leaving valuables in the car. We even had to go back to the car when we remembered that we had left some cash in plain sight within the car. Never once that I give much thought of the laptop that I left behind. It was Subang Jaya! It was basically my neighbourhood.

I continued to have a bad feeling about something but by the time I acted on it, it was already too late. We came back to the car only to find that the rear side mirror that looked into the boot area of the hatchback has been smashed in and the contents of the boot moved around. The thief was able to get to my laptop bag which was beneath the other bags which was hiding it from plain sight. I'm guessing that they were able to see the bags from the outside and decided to try their luck as they might have figured that we had recently came back from a trip. Given that the parking space was fairly deserted, they might have sufficient time to root around the boot for something valuable to take.

After recovering from the initial shock, we proceeded to report the break in to the Carrefour security department and then to the police at the nearby Subang Jaya Police Station. Thankfully both experience were fairly painless and speedy. I do not have much hope of recovering the items stolen so the reports were more for documentation formalities that would be needed to report the theft to the office since it was a company laptop that I lost.

Once all the formalities completed, we went off for a late dinner and came back home to call it the day. I have to admit to a sense of being violated and a bit fearful after the incident that night. It was enough to get me rattled to the point that I had to lock up the main grill which I normally do only when I leave home on an extended trip. In my mind, I was worried if there was anything that they took that would lead them back to where I lived.

Thankfully that feeling subsided once I had a good night's sleep. The following day was spent dealing with the aftermath of the incident. As I am typing this entry, I have still to get everything that I lost sorted out. I expect that the next few days to be both quite slow and tedious. Not only do I need to get the hardware replacement sorted out but also have to figure out how to recover all the work/documents/items that I stored on the both the laptop and external hard disk that was taken.

It is hard for me not to feel somewhat disconnected knowing that I've lost a lot of things thanks to that moment of carelessness. It does feel like having your legs chopped off from under you especially when a lot of my work and personal life is linked to the items that I had stored on that computer. Recreating them would definitely be a huge task ahead. Like it or not, I have to tackle this face on.

Hopefully this blog entry will stay here as a reminder for myself not to every do somethng this stupid again!