So, you might of notices that I haven't posted in a week. The reason is that my wonderful Apple Macbook Pro was stolen out of the office last Friday. It was only today, that money paid out from insurance, so that I could pick up the replacement.
Let's start from the beginning. I have moved from being on university campus to working in a large glass building that was bought by the university 2 years ago because my supervisor moved there about 2 or 3 months ago. We were on the 9th floor and I was working in a large open office at a cubicle while my supervisor was in a large glass office.
I wasn't too comfortable with this because of the low security my laptop would be in when we go down to the cantina on the 3rd floor for lunch and my professor could always lock his office. So, usually what I decided to do was when I decided to go down for lunch, I locked my computer in the desk drawer and took the key. Only, I noticed that couple of weeks ago that the the desk drawers no locked properly, there was all of a sudden something wrong with that rod locking mechanism where you could pull open the locked top drawer and the rest would unlock even though it locked securely before. I didn't think too of it, I just thought that the lock was broken, nor did I think of calling the maintenance people to come and fix it because we were going to move to 7th floor anyway. Anyway, at that point I instead started to either lock it in the drawer in the desk next to it or in my professors office but it was just last Friday that I forgot to do it. Needless to say, when I got back from the cantina, my laptop was gone. I nearly had a borderline meltdown and even smashed my own cellphone in front of al, the people there. We went to security, and they spent 20 minutes looking through the security camera footage to see who took it. Eventually they found it and then they took 20 more minutes trying to find out where they went and for a while, it looked like they had just vanished. Meanwhile what had actually happened was that the one guy (there were 2 of them) walked in with something that looks like backpack and put my laptop as well as my friend's into it, and put it on his back so that he doesn't look suspicious but then somewhere between that floor and ground floor he actually switched to different staircase (explaining why it took them so long to work out where he went) and then left the building and got away only 2 minutes after stealing both laptops. It's as though they knew exactly where was a blind spot in the security camera footage. The fact that it stolen at just the one time when it was left unguarded plus the fact that that desk drawer was all of a sudden busted makes me suspect that it might of been tampered with, as though someone actually knew that I kept my Macbook there and had one on the 9th floor. We have pictures of both laptops being stolen though.
The worst part of all this is that 4 years of PhD work is on that Macbook. I have some backups but this sets me back months. To top it all off, I don't even have a serial number for that Macbook, I think we lost the invoice when we moved to a new home in 2013 yet the police want it. I didn't even have Find My Mac or anything like that enabled on that Macbook. Despite getting it replaced, I'm still sad and angry to of lost that to theft.
26 May 2016, 6:07 pm
