I had my backpack - with (work) laptop, both passports, wallet, house keys, etc. - stolen from a pub in Euston a couple of years ago. All that remained in my pockets was my phone & power bank, and airpods. It was stolen by a guy who went into the pub we were at, sat at an adjacent table, pretended to study the menu, deposited a dummy backpack to the communal pile under our table when we were standing to greet people, then picked up the heaviest one (mine) and walked out. Unlike the author, I wasn't black-out drunk, we were just distracted and someone was able to do a sleight of hand when we weren't paying attention.
The author is very lucky to get theirs back. I had to replace it all. As they say, replacing the UK one wasn't too bad - though I hadn't been in the UK for 2 years by that point so I had to get extra guarantors to sign photos and write a declaration. The other one was a nightmare, and by pure luck the embassy could look up my last application and pull the birth certificate reference number for me. Again, 2 guarantors and I was very lucky to have a friend from that country visiting.
I reported it as stolen, hoping that they'd steal the laptop and wallet and then ditch the rest. Unfortunately, either nobody found it or nobody turned it in. Of course, the CCTV that was in the pub was 'too blurry' to be of any use. CCTV has a funny tendency of being useless in that regard.
In my case, I crashed at a friend's place that evening, and then went down to my local makerspace for lack of wanting to pay a locksmith £fuckloads to unlock my door on a Sunday. By pure luck, there was a lockpicking nerd there and they came and slipped my door for me. Thankfully, that was enough to help offset a lot of the negativity of the whole affair. I felt like I got off lucky a bit, and didn't dwell so much on it as a result.
Lived in London for over 40 years. Never let your stuff out of sight for a minute. My foot always goes through a loop on my bag. Had at least two attempts to grab it which was stopped dead by this. I use a knackered looking Osprey daylite plus bag which has straps around the zips that stops people casually having a go at it as well. Mostly no issues in the last 10 years but I know people who are careless and have been done a few times.
My general travel experience, outside the UK, is that if you dress down, use a knackered looking bag and a shitty no brand knackered phone case and people will leave you alone. Passport goes on you in a zipped inner pocket anywhere on the planet. Same with wallet, keys, anything. Never wear anything that indicates you have an iPhone worth nicking. Apple Watch / Airpods make you a target.
20 years ago I had a somewhat similar experience - a pub off The Strand in central London.
My bag/briefcase was under a (high) table, and in that case the pub was able to view CCTV and work out the guy who sat nearby and hooked his leg to grab my bag - while I was distracted.
Luckily for me, while it contained laptop and passport, I got a call 20 mins later from my wife, who had been contacted by someone 100m away in a different pub. The thief had taken my bag with laptop, not realised there was also a passport in there, gone to another pub, stolen another bag, switched my laptop into said bag, and gone off. The owner of other lost laptop had found my (empty) bag/passport, rang my wife, and we met and at least I got bag (and passport) back...
Net result, lost laptop, but not lost passport. Much less hassle, although still a wake up call...
> CCTV has a funny tendency of being useless in that regard
I don't think it's safe to depend on this by default.
I know a few business owners who have video (and audio) recording set ups in their business where 100+ customers come and go daily.
There might be 6 motion activated cameras saving everything to a local box in the store. That box might have let's say 1TB of disk space. Even with motion activated cameras it could fill up in ~3 weeks to where it's no longer recording.
Once it gets filled up, it gets permanently deleted with no backups. This could be a manual and adhoc process, it depends on the owner.
I never had any say in how they operate, just repeating what I've heard and seen.
This idea of trusting that companies record and save all interactions and calls indefinitely is no way something I'd trust for anything important.
heh someone broke into a house i was staying at in Costa Rica and stole my backpack while i was working in the next room! I go back to get something and there's footprints in/out of a sliding glass door and no backpack. Fortunately, the only thing they got was my ADHD medicine. Sorta sucked for my employer for those 3 weeks I was without but it could have been much worse.
Interestingly, i did my best to follow the footsteps which led to a trail that went up through the jungle. Maybe 100 yards up a hill there was a little spot that definitely looked well used by humans overlooking the house and straight through a large window. I suspect whoever it was had been watching us for a while and when my wife/kids left, leaving me alone, just walked in, grabbed the backpack and left. (wife was not pleased as you could imagine)
I witnessed almost the exact same thing on an adjacent table; someone crouching down pretending to do their shoelaces for a suspiciously long time. Unfortunately I didn’t click what was going on until after they’d left.
> had my backpack - with (work) laptop, both passports, wallet, house keys, etc. - stolen
I’ve made a similar experience a while back. Since then I’ve completely reduced the number of important items I carry around simultaneously in the same bag/location.
I have a similar story, one that also took place in London. I had my bag stolen from under a chair outside a pub near UCL. It contained various important things including my passport, a journal with about six month’s of writing in it, critical notes for a project I was working on, etc. I was devastated.
A week later I had mostly made my peace with losing all my stuff and was about to apply, for a new passport, when I received a very posh letter in the post with an imposing coat of arms atop it; it was from the Duke of Bedford’s estate, which owns most of the land all around Bloomsbury. They told me they had found my bag in the locked garden in the middle of Bedford Square. The thieves must have thrown it over the railings, and fortunately there was a letter addressed to me inside it that gave away my address. I went to their very grand estate office to collect it and, amazingly, everything was still there, including the passport which the thieves apparently did not want.
>A couple of years ago, I would have panicked at this moment. I'm pretty neurotic: my mind is constantly occupied with producing negative scenarios that "need" to be considered and anticipated. I eat myself from inside out with endless "what ifs", calculating worst-case scenarios and failures — all that sort of thing.
I can relate strongly to this. ADHD and OCD tendencies made leaving for even a vacation frustrating.
I think part of that was growing up in a situation where losing something important like a phone or laptop was a financial hardship that meant real, lasting pain.
Now, as I am older and more financially stable, I only really worry that I have my phone and wallet. And really I only need one of them. All of my IDs are scanned and backed up online. I just need a device and internet connection and I can recover enough of my life to get home, where I can get back on track and order new items. When going over our final leave-list, my partner and I typically just end with “and we have a credit card, so it doesn’t matter if we’ve forgotten something”.
When traveling to more remote places with less of a chance of being able to replace a phone at short notice, I do bring an old phone as backup.
> I think part of that was growing up in a situation where losing something important like a phone or laptop was a financial hardship that meant real, lasting pain.
The brain is interesting, that's for sure. Old habits and mindsets stick around a long time.
I still write important things on paper like final destination addresses or reservation numbers because I don't trust my phone.
When I went on a solo 2 week Euro trip to Portugal and Spain last year I had ~30 printed pieces of paper of reservation details / maps in my backpack just in case something happened with my phone. I didn't carry them all with me everywhere but as time went on in the trip, I brought the specific ones with me for that day in a day bag.
I didn't plan the trip in too much detail, mainly just hotel reservations and high level bullets for things to do in the few cities I went to but having everything printed gave me peace of mind. I didn't have to use a single piece of paper in the end.
It does make me think how much easier it would be traveling with a friend or partner because having 2 phones is a massive perk for redundancy.
I have airtags in my backpack, briefcase, wallet, luggage and keys now. One of the best qol improvements I've done. I'm careless and forget stuff a lot and even just saving the few minutes it regularly took me to find stuff misplaced at home is great. It also let me recover my bag when I forgot it on a train (I watched it go to a holding station overnight and travel all over the country the next day, and could then anticipate where it would be and go take it back)
I also have a similar experience to that described in the article (nearly 10 years ago, pre airtags) of having my wallet drop out my pocket while cycling in the Netherlands. A German couple found it and took it back to Germany with them as they weren't sure what to do. They found me on Facebook, asked if it was ok to take some cash from the wallet, and put it in the post back to me in NL.
Coming from South Africa which probably has similarities to Russia in terms of return rates for lost valuable belongings it was quite a defining moment of "Europe" for me.
Story of a recovered passport - no alcohol and 21 years back.
Was visiting Toronto labor day weekend 2004 with a freshly minted green card and India's passport with family (wife+2kids). Was in Eaton center, we were trying to take a train/metro to somewhere, kept my waist pouch (that I used those days) on top of the stroller's canopy to pay at the ticket counter and when I was done, of course the pouch was not there.
The realization of theft was immediate. I could not have dropped it earlier since I just took the money out. It disappeared in the last one minute. BTW, not just the pouch, even the wallet was gone as I had taken only the cash and put everything on top of the stroller's canopy. Wallet, Passports, Green Card - all gone.
Talked to the Mall security, they did not do much except write a report and make me call credit card companies to cancel the cards. Then went to police, but police said they can not do anything without an ID and asked me to get an ID (temporary or whatever from my embassy). Of course it is a Sunday and the embassy is closed. Could go back to hotel, still had access to rental car (that we decided not to use for this trip), but that was it. Tried to think through this but nope - this was so unchartered I did not know what to do. What will happen to work, how will I get passport, how will we get green card reprocessed, how will we pay the hotel (since the cards were canceled) - complete (but not visible) panic.
Thankfully my company had offices in Toronto, so found some connections and trying to talk to them on what will happen if I got stranded in Toronto like this. They started looking into this.
Also talked to my landlord back in US and ask him to be prepared to go to our apartment and pull out the green card files. Told him I will call back if I need help.
By now it is 2+ hours. We are walking back to Hotel, and I get a call (thanks cellphones) from someone saying they found my pouch with passports. It appears my checkbook was also in the pouch and that had my phone number. They are not nearby - "oh I found it on the train as I was leaving" and now you will need to come here, about 45 minutes west from there. I say sure I will be there as soon as I can. I call my company's contact and they provide me an escort since it was an unknown area to me (and them). I get the car, my wife does not want me to go alone so it is all of us, we pick up my "colleague" from his home, and land up at the place we were asked to.
Thankfully a person comes down from a tall building and hands me the bag. The bag had 300-400 when I lost it, but now it is just 20 bucks. He says that's how it was. And then he asks me for a finders fee - I give the 20 bucks to him, and move on.
Except the money, got back everything else. Phew.
[ Edit - Trying to remember the scenario more since I came back here to respond to a question. My wallet was definitely gone. How did the mall security get me to cancel the cards? As I recall, we called 2 credit card companies ... and canceled those cards based on the social, but at that point I was sure the mall security was not going to help, so I said those were all the cards I had and left from there. ]
police said they can not do anything without an ID and asked me to get an ID (temporary or whatever from my embassy)
that makes no sense. in order to get a new passport/ID, even a temporary one from the embassy of my country i need to have a police report and my birth certificate (which could take time to get). in other words, police needs to act first. sounds like that cop had no clue.
It used to be somebody would slip you a Rohypnol and roll you. Now you slip yourself a Phenibut and get rolled.
I wouldn't characterize Phenibut as a "nootropic" as it's arguable that such a thing (nootropic) exists. I'd say it is "Русский for Valium".
When I was in college there were forums like "alt.drugs" where people shared stories like "I smoked weed and had a lot of fun" and Erowid was like that for a while but pretty soon it was full of stories that the Partnership for a Drug Free America couldn't have made up, often people who took way too many downers and got into trouble.
Is this just you subjective experience or is it backed by some data or research? For me personally, sleeping after phenibut doesn't feel healthy at all -- in fact I often end up sleeping for 12+ hours unless I have something important to do in the morning, and it's extremely hard to get out of bed every time.
I don't know if it compares to Ambien at all, but my wife takes that and every once in a while I take one to help get to sleep. It gets me to sleep and I stay knocked out, but a long 8 hour sleep with Ambien never seems as good as a "real" 5 hour sleep without it.
My late friend Hugh Daniel used to refer to his Bihn's backpack [1] as his "LSD", for "Life Support Device". Like when we were leaving the house he'd shout in his boisterous voice so all the neighbors could hear, "Oh no, I forgot my LSD! I'll be right back!" then run back in and fetch his backpack.
This is a dream I have a few times a year. The panic! The horror! Everything gone. Just the feeling of personal loss and devastation every time I have the dream.
It sounds too good to be true... article mentioned none of the side effects that other commenters had rightly pointed out. Otherwise I would actually be tempted, but there are no free lunches (especially when messing with your biology).
I think it may cause cognitive decline. I mean longterm.
It was rightly banned in Australia. Fuckwits had a tendency of buying it online and then taking huge doses without a break (sensitisation) and then posting essays on the sheer horror they go through when the drug leaves their system and they rebound.
A nice reminder to libertarians that, yes you may be smart and careful with risk taking but there are many fuckwits who aren’t and shouldn’t have to suffer because of it unnecessarily.
The title of the post is misleading, because it is not revealed in the story how the backpack was actually lost. The short summary: ``I don't remember how I lost my backpack, because I was heavily intoxicated during those hours when I lost it.''
> A man named Simon wrote: he had found my backpack and wanted to return it. He’d spotted the bag in Camden and at first thought of walking past, but someone had recently returned his lost phone, so he decided to do the right thing.
pay it forward ftw.
that is so cool; i hope society does this kind of thing more and more, i think its desperately needed (especially in the crazy timeline we are in)
Honestly. When I was a kid 20 years ago backpacking around i was worried about this. Now I'm also worried about it but honestly there aren't very many issues. I've had temporary passports issued, cancelled cards, new phones setup on "new sims". One thing I did carry back then was keys. I don't anymore. The rest is just so easy to replace these days. My laptop is insured and so is my work one.
That’s a bit harsh. Dude did one thing that’s legal where he lives plus alcohol and besides this one occurrence hasn’t had anything negative impact on his life. I’d hardly call that an “addict.”
[+] [-] NamTaf|8 months ago|reply
The author is very lucky to get theirs back. I had to replace it all. As they say, replacing the UK one wasn't too bad - though I hadn't been in the UK for 2 years by that point so I had to get extra guarantors to sign photos and write a declaration. The other one was a nightmare, and by pure luck the embassy could look up my last application and pull the birth certificate reference number for me. Again, 2 guarantors and I was very lucky to have a friend from that country visiting.
I reported it as stolen, hoping that they'd steal the laptop and wallet and then ditch the rest. Unfortunately, either nobody found it or nobody turned it in. Of course, the CCTV that was in the pub was 'too blurry' to be of any use. CCTV has a funny tendency of being useless in that regard.
In my case, I crashed at a friend's place that evening, and then went down to my local makerspace for lack of wanting to pay a locksmith £fuckloads to unlock my door on a Sunday. By pure luck, there was a lockpicking nerd there and they came and slipped my door for me. Thankfully, that was enough to help offset a lot of the negativity of the whole affair. I felt like I got off lucky a bit, and didn't dwell so much on it as a result.
[+] [-] crinkly|8 months ago|reply
My general travel experience, outside the UK, is that if you dress down, use a knackered looking bag and a shitty no brand knackered phone case and people will leave you alone. Passport goes on you in a zipped inner pocket anywhere on the planet. Same with wallet, keys, anything. Never wear anything that indicates you have an iPhone worth nicking. Apple Watch / Airpods make you a target.
Many people aren't travel savvy. It scares me.
[+] [-] robaato|8 months ago|reply
My bag/briefcase was under a (high) table, and in that case the pub was able to view CCTV and work out the guy who sat nearby and hooked his leg to grab my bag - while I was distracted.
Luckily for me, while it contained laptop and passport, I got a call 20 mins later from my wife, who had been contacted by someone 100m away in a different pub. The thief had taken my bag with laptop, not realised there was also a passport in there, gone to another pub, stolen another bag, switched my laptop into said bag, and gone off. The owner of other lost laptop had found my (empty) bag/passport, rang my wife, and we met and at least I got bag (and passport) back...
Net result, lost laptop, but not lost passport. Much less hassle, although still a wake up call...
[+] [-] nickjj|8 months ago|reply
I don't think it's safe to depend on this by default.
I know a few business owners who have video (and audio) recording set ups in their business where 100+ customers come and go daily.
There might be 6 motion activated cameras saving everything to a local box in the store. That box might have let's say 1TB of disk space. Even with motion activated cameras it could fill up in ~3 weeks to where it's no longer recording.
Once it gets filled up, it gets permanently deleted with no backups. This could be a manual and adhoc process, it depends on the owner.
I never had any say in how they operate, just repeating what I've heard and seen.
This idea of trusting that companies record and save all interactions and calls indefinitely is no way something I'd trust for anything important.
[+] [-] chasd00|8 months ago|reply
Interestingly, i did my best to follow the footsteps which led to a trail that went up through the jungle. Maybe 100 yards up a hill there was a little spot that definitely looked well used by humans overlooking the house and straight through a large window. I suspect whoever it was had been watching us for a while and when my wife/kids left, leaving me alone, just walked in, grabbed the backpack and left. (wife was not pleased as you could imagine)
[+] [-] cjrp|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|8 months ago|reply
I’ve made a similar experience a while back. Since then I’ve completely reduced the number of important items I carry around simultaneously in the same bag/location.
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|8 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] libraryofbabel|8 months ago|reply
A week later I had mostly made my peace with losing all my stuff and was about to apply, for a new passport, when I received a very posh letter in the post with an imposing coat of arms atop it; it was from the Duke of Bedford’s estate, which owns most of the land all around Bloomsbury. They told me they had found my bag in the locked garden in the middle of Bedford Square. The thieves must have thrown it over the railings, and fortunately there was a letter addressed to me inside it that gave away my address. I went to their very grand estate office to collect it and, amazingly, everything was still there, including the passport which the thieves apparently did not want.
[+] [-] LeafItAlone|8 months ago|reply
I can relate strongly to this. ADHD and OCD tendencies made leaving for even a vacation frustrating. I think part of that was growing up in a situation where losing something important like a phone or laptop was a financial hardship that meant real, lasting pain.
Now, as I am older and more financially stable, I only really worry that I have my phone and wallet. And really I only need one of them. All of my IDs are scanned and backed up online. I just need a device and internet connection and I can recover enough of my life to get home, where I can get back on track and order new items. When going over our final leave-list, my partner and I typically just end with “and we have a credit card, so it doesn’t matter if we’ve forgotten something”.
When traveling to more remote places with less of a chance of being able to replace a phone at short notice, I do bring an old phone as backup.
[+] [-] nickjj|8 months ago|reply
The brain is interesting, that's for sure. Old habits and mindsets stick around a long time.
I still write important things on paper like final destination addresses or reservation numbers because I don't trust my phone.
When I went on a solo 2 week Euro trip to Portugal and Spain last year I had ~30 printed pieces of paper of reservation details / maps in my backpack just in case something happened with my phone. I didn't carry them all with me everywhere but as time went on in the trip, I brought the specific ones with me for that day in a day bag.
I didn't plan the trip in too much detail, mainly just hotel reservations and high level bullets for things to do in the few cities I went to but having everything printed gave me peace of mind. I didn't have to use a single piece of paper in the end.
It does make me think how much easier it would be traveling with a friend or partner because having 2 phones is a massive perk for redundancy.
[+] [-] et-al|8 months ago|reply
How do you deal with 2FA? Do you memorize a few of your backup codes?
[+] [-] sixhobbits|8 months ago|reply
I also have a similar experience to that described in the article (nearly 10 years ago, pre airtags) of having my wallet drop out my pocket while cycling in the Netherlands. A German couple found it and took it back to Germany with them as they weren't sure what to do. They found me on Facebook, asked if it was ok to take some cash from the wallet, and put it in the post back to me in NL.
Coming from South Africa which probably has similarities to Russia in terms of return rates for lost valuable belongings it was quite a defining moment of "Europe" for me.
[+] [-] kshacker|8 months ago|reply
Was visiting Toronto labor day weekend 2004 with a freshly minted green card and India's passport with family (wife+2kids). Was in Eaton center, we were trying to take a train/metro to somewhere, kept my waist pouch (that I used those days) on top of the stroller's canopy to pay at the ticket counter and when I was done, of course the pouch was not there.
The realization of theft was immediate. I could not have dropped it earlier since I just took the money out. It disappeared in the last one minute. BTW, not just the pouch, even the wallet was gone as I had taken only the cash and put everything on top of the stroller's canopy. Wallet, Passports, Green Card - all gone.
Talked to the Mall security, they did not do much except write a report and make me call credit card companies to cancel the cards. Then went to police, but police said they can not do anything without an ID and asked me to get an ID (temporary or whatever from my embassy). Of course it is a Sunday and the embassy is closed. Could go back to hotel, still had access to rental car (that we decided not to use for this trip), but that was it. Tried to think through this but nope - this was so unchartered I did not know what to do. What will happen to work, how will I get passport, how will we get green card reprocessed, how will we pay the hotel (since the cards were canceled) - complete (but not visible) panic.
Thankfully my company had offices in Toronto, so found some connections and trying to talk to them on what will happen if I got stranded in Toronto like this. They started looking into this.
Also talked to my landlord back in US and ask him to be prepared to go to our apartment and pull out the green card files. Told him I will call back if I need help.
By now it is 2+ hours. We are walking back to Hotel, and I get a call (thanks cellphones) from someone saying they found my pouch with passports. It appears my checkbook was also in the pouch and that had my phone number. They are not nearby - "oh I found it on the train as I was leaving" and now you will need to come here, about 45 minutes west from there. I say sure I will be there as soon as I can. I call my company's contact and they provide me an escort since it was an unknown area to me (and them). I get the car, my wife does not want me to go alone so it is all of us, we pick up my "colleague" from his home, and land up at the place we were asked to.
Thankfully a person comes down from a tall building and hands me the bag. The bag had 300-400 when I lost it, but now it is just 20 bucks. He says that's how it was. And then he asks me for a finders fee - I give the 20 bucks to him, and move on.
Except the money, got back everything else. Phew.
[ Edit - Trying to remember the scenario more since I came back here to respond to a question. My wallet was definitely gone. How did the mall security get me to cancel the cards? As I recall, we called 2 credit card companies ... and canceled those cards based on the social, but at that point I was sure the mall security was not going to help, so I said those were all the cards I had and left from there. ]
[+] [-] em-bee|8 months ago|reply
that makes no sense. in order to get a new passport/ID, even a temporary one from the embassy of my country i need to have a police report and my birth certificate (which could take time to get). in other words, police needs to act first. sounds like that cop had no clue.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|8 months ago|reply
I wouldn't characterize Phenibut as a "nootropic" as it's arguable that such a thing (nootropic) exists. I'd say it is "Русский for Valium".
When I was in college there were forums like "alt.drugs" where people shared stories like "I smoked weed and had a lot of fun" and Erowid was like that for a while but pretty soon it was full of stories that the Partnership for a Drug Free America couldn't have made up, often people who took way too many downers and got into trouble.
[+] [-] StrandedKitty|8 months ago|reply
Is this just you subjective experience or is it backed by some data or research? For me personally, sleeping after phenibut doesn't feel healthy at all -- in fact I often end up sleeping for 12+ hours unless I have something important to do in the morning, and it's extremely hard to get out of bed every time.
[+] [-] ddtaylor|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|8 months ago|reply
But now my smartphone is my LSD.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13687369
[+] [-] nancyminusone|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gumboshoes|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] narrator|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Liftyee|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] arresin|8 months ago|reply
It was rightly banned in Australia. Fuckwits had a tendency of buying it online and then taking huge doses without a break (sensitisation) and then posting essays on the sheer horror they go through when the drug leaves their system and they rebound.
A nice reminder to libertarians that, yes you may be smart and careful with risk taking but there are many fuckwits who aren’t and shouldn’t have to suffer because of it unnecessarily.
[+] [-] ptspts|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|8 months ago|reply
Stories like this make me thankful that it is very painful for me to drink more than 2 beers, even though I very much enjoy beer.
[+] [-] arrowsmith|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] andrekandre|8 months ago|reply
that is so cool; i hope society does this kind of thing more and more, i think its desperately needed (especially in the crazy timeline we are in)
[+] [-] PokemonNoGo|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayffffas|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkusWandel|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] abetancort|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hungryhobbit|8 months ago|reply
There, I just saved you from having to read the long ramblings of a drug addict who did too many drugs ... and lost his backpack.
[+] [-] xp84|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] codingminds|8 months ago|reply
> Simon gave my backpack back to me intact.
I'd say yes.
[+] [-] jdalgetty|8 months ago|reply