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Saturday, November 26, 2016

Pick Pockets Spoli everything



This past week has been the week of my wife's birthday celebrations. We rode the AVE fast train from Valencia to Madrid in Preferente, or First Class. Now we are hooked! No more Tourist class for us.

We arrived there and took a taxi to our hotel on the Grand Avenue. We checked in and we pushed the button for the lift. There was a man standing there who was well dressed, and in spite of the fact there was a lady he insisted on entering first.(He needed to be behind us.) We were three in that small space. He pressed the first floor and as soon as the lift began to move he moved closer to me. I should have followed my first mind, which was to allow him to ride up by himself as I thought it peculiar that he pushed ahead of us to get in first.

He asked "Cafeteria?, Cafeteria?" At that point I concluded "Here we go again." I covered the point of my man bag closest to him with my hand and sure enough there came his left hand that was covered with his coat and he encountered my hand. I tickled his fingers and he jumped back. I smiled and admonished him not to do that. I didn't just get off the boat pal. His eyes went as wide as saucers. When the door opened he shot out and was gone. The danger was that I didn't know what he had in his right hand, which could have been a knife in case I tried to take him down.

We called the desk and gave them a description. They thought something was strange because they did notice him entering the lift with us, and then immediately he came down the stairs and out of the hotel. They called the police and within half an hour he had been arrested as a person of interest who was well known to them.

He got nothing from me as my things are secured with chains within my bag. I learned that many years ago when that foiled four beautiful Eastern European women who accosted me in broad daylight, surrounding me with their gorgeous bodies which they rubbed against me while trying to steal me blind. They actually had pulled my wallet and a second bag with my credit cards from my bag, but because they were on chains they became confused and the tugging alerted me as to what was going on. Again, they got nothing.

In every country around the world crime takes place everyday.People wake up in the morning and have a shower; they get dressed, have breakfast, and they go to work. Their careers centre around relieving the careless and uninformed of everything they can get. This is their work and they are very good at it.

In our case the man goes from hotel to hotel in the city employing various ruses to strip the newly arrived of whatever he can get. After dealing with the front desk I didn't actually fix my straps to secure the bag because I was only going up in the lift. He was counting on that.

I once stopped at a counter in a shopping centre where there was no  one else around to ask a simple question. The top of my bag was open. Within half a second that counter suddenly became of interest to a whole family. I moved on very quickly, closing my bag in the process.

The moral of this story is that we are all open to suffer loss by theft every time we leave home. We cannot know exactly who is watching us, but we can safely assume our every move is under scrutiny because there are numerous people who are counting on successfully stealing from us.

Beware! Always!

Copyright (c) 2016
Eugene Carmichael