A story to give you hope

'A thief broke into my car. I used Craigslist, a dating site, MySpace and a fast food joint to track him down'

You can read the whole story at Salon.com but here a few extracts to whet your appetite:

'In the first 24 hours after someone broke into my car in my own driveway, I was mostly mad at my husband. Who leaves a backpack with a BlackBerry and a wallet full of cash and credit cards in the car overnight, with a GPS visible on the dashboard and the freaking car doors unlocked? We might as well have hung a sign on the door that read: Suckers live here. Welcome!

...

I canceled four credit cards and ordered a new BlackBerry before I thought to check Craigslist. I didn't know what I'd find, but it occurred to me that pawn shops were the domain of desperate crackheads and that the savvy modern thief would hock stolen wares online. I did a search in a 40-mile radius of my neighborhood. My GPS was the first thing that popped up.

...

After school, my kids and I set out on foot for a scavenger hunt. On one neighbor's lawn, we found the little cardboard wish boxes the kids had decorated at the museum the previous day. We found my discarded Books Inc. frequent book buyers' card, ready to be redeemed, among some bushes. (Not a big reader, this guy.) My backpack lay in someone's driveway, barely hidden by some shrubs. My BlackBerry and makeup were still inside.

...

See, aspiring thief, you just never know what you're stepping into when you hit up a random car on a random street. However badass you think you may be, there is someone on the other side of the robbery. And in this particular case it was someone who escaped the Iranian Revolution as a child; who roamed the world alone for five years because her parents couldn't get out; who watched from a dozen blocks away as the twin towers crumbled; who had just barely clawed her way out of that concentration camp known as late-stage cancer, if only because she was intent on raising her babies, come hell or high water. And all of this before she even turned 40. Can you see how that someone might be way more twisted than you?'

Do read the whole story, it's very 'cool'...