01 Aug, 2016
Thinking about recent thefts in Westboro
Posted by andrea tomkins in: Misc. life|Ottawa
As some of you already know, our place was broken into a few weeks ago. This has left me a little bit paranoid, as you can imagine. There have been a number of B&E’s around our area and I’ve also heard reports of bikes going missing.
Sidebar: have you ever taken a look at the Ottawa Police crime map? It’s actually quite interesting and gives you a good picture of what crimes are happening in your neighbourhood as well as the kinds of crimes are happening. You can access it from this page (then click “launch the Ottawa Crime Mapping Tool” on the right side of the page).
Anyway, I rode my bike to work the other day and got to thinking about my bike and how much it would suck if it got stolen.
It’s pretty old, and it’s not valuable, but it would be a major inconvenience if it was stolen and I would be pretty sad to lose it. And THEN I thought, if it did get stolen, would I be able to describe it to the police? Ha. Not really. If someone asked I would describe it as a red and blue mountain bike but that’s about it. It’s weird, but even though I’ve owned this bike for years it’s a rather unremarkable part of my domestic scenery that I don’t notice anymore – like wallpaper – although the fact that I don’t know if there are any markings on my bike doesn’t make it less valuable to me.
So I decided to take two minutes out of my day to snap a few photos of my bike. If it’s ever stolen, at least now I’ll have something to show the police, the insurance company, and pawn shops. :|
I took a few wide shots, as well as closeups of some distinctive scratches and marks. As far as I could tell, my bike doesn’t have a serial number.
Seriously, it took two minutes. Although it won’t prevent it from getting stolen, at least I feel a little more prepared. I even went so far as to tag the file names in my terribly disorganized photo library so I’ll be able to find them quickly. I just hope I never need to find them!
