An amusing memory

Around the year 2000 I owned a 22 room boarding house in the poor Brisbane suburb of Ipswich. The demograhics were adverse, with a significant fraction of the tenants being fresh out of the "big house".

I reserved a front room for myself. I would spend time there watching TV while tenants came to me with rents, problems etc. My TV was an old B&W monitor drawing on the signal from an old VCR that was no good for its original purpose but still had a working tuner. So all the tenants could see that I was using a VCR without knowing that the VCR was useless for recording or playing back video tapes.

One or two of the resident thieves saw this and decided to steal the VCR to sell it to a pawnshop or the like. But that was not easy as I had placed deadlocks on all the doors.

Nothing daunted, they took advantage of my room being fairly close to the ground and moved a wheelie bin to underneath my window -- and climbed on the bin and broke in via the window. The deadlock prevented them from exiting via the door so they had to climb back out of the window with the VCR

When I saw what had happened and the trouble the thieves had taken, I was much amused and liked to imagine their conversation with the pawnbroker and the look of both surprise and disappoinmenton on their faces when they were told the VCR was worthless! They would not have been able to figure out where they got it wrong. I mentioned the matter to some of the other tenants so the the thieves would have become quite a laughing stock throughout the boarding house