I laughed my ass off when I read this story. It’s great to see a thief have a really bad day for a change. Gutsy young men with a story to tell for the rest of their life.
This summer my wife and I went on holidays to Alaska. Took our brand new RV for a test run and all was well. About two weeks into the trip we got a call from our daughter with some bad news. Our house had been broken in to, and we had been robbed. Of course that put a damper on things for a few days, but the police were on it, and we knew our home insurance would cover the loss. The only thing we were sad about was my wife’s engagement ring, and my expensive antique wrist watch collection.
The engagement ring was priceless to us, and the watch collection would be impossible to replace. I asked my son to run down to the pawn shops and take a quick look around to see if he could spot some of my watches or his mom’s engagement ring under glass. He did this, being the good son that he is.
Two days later I got a surprise phone call from my daughter Julie saying that my son Matt had some surprising news. He had been cruising the pawn shops looking for our jewellery, when he actually spotted a young woman wearing an exotic engagement ring similar to his Mom’s (it’s a very special engagement ring, with an extremely setting, and band)
He saw her sitting in a car in front of a local pawn shop. He’s a pretty smooth operator, so he asked her for a light on his cigarette, and started chatting with her. As he was talking to her he took a good look at the ring to make sure he was certain it was my wife’s ring. As he was doing that he looked in the back seat and noticed a bag as well. He assumed the bag was likely to have other hot items in it.
Not knowing what to do he just kept the conversation very short, and thanked her for the light of his cigarette. Just as he was leaving, the girl in the car was waved into the pawn shop by a guy in the doorway. She got up and ran inside. My son, who was by now 40 feet down the sidewalk, doubled back to see if she remembered to lock her door. She didn’t.
Matt opened the car door, quickly opened the bag, and saw various items, and he recognized some of my antique watches in the bag. He especially noticed my display box, and now he knew that was his mother’s engagement ring on the girl’s finger. He grabbed the bag, and ducked away. Then it gets better.
Matt walked back to his car, and drove around the block. He parked again where he could see the car which now had the girl and guy sitting in it having an “animated discussion”. It was obvious that they were distressed about the missing bag of goodies from their back-seat. Eventually they drove away, and Matt followed them.
They drove about 7 miles to the other side of town, and Matt kept his distance. They pulled into a driveway, and got out of the car. They were still arguing loudly, as Matt watched on from down the road. By this time Matt had called a few of his friends to tell him about his adventure. They cooked up a scheme, whereby his friends would back their truck into the thieves driveway like they were just using their driveway to turn around. They would lightly bump into their car, and then be the good citizens and go to their door to let them know of the small fender bender. Sounds clever right.
Within minutes Matt’s three buddies showed up with their beat up pickup truck that one of them used for work. They backed the truck up into the driveway as planned, but they were a little too heavy on the gas pedal. They completely caved in the back-end of the small compact car. The impact made enough noise to bring the unfortunate thieves running out of the house. The guy came first, and the girl came after. The fella was losing it – swearing at the top of his lungs, and at one point said,
“This day couldn’t get any worse!!!!”
Matt’s friends continued to play along with the story, that they were just using their driveway to turn around in. They apologized and asked to trade information for insurance, but for some reason the thieves didn’t want anything to do with the police, or insurance companies.
As the guy thief became very angry, Matt’s friends began to get annoyed with his level of obnoxious noise. They grabbed him, forced him to the ground, took his wallet, his keys, and his cell phone. The girl came after the boys, one of them took her arm and twisted it behind her back. While they had her arm behind her back, they ripped off the engagement ring from her finger taking some skin with it in the process. By the time the boys were done with our unfortunate thieves, they with pretty banged up and upset. They ran back in their house while at the same time screaming out profanities, and threats of revenge.
The boys jumped in the truck, slammed it into reverse, and finished caving in their car a few more times. They drove off and met Matt and our daughter at her apartment. She took all of my watches, and my wife’s engagement ring (after removing the skin from it….yecchhh) and put it back in our house.
Matt, and his two friends went to the ball-game that night and had a great time re-living the exciting events. Laughter was abundant, but I was not happy to hear that they had even approached these unfortunate thieves. A simple license plate number and address would have sufficed.
Anyway, we got our stuff back, and couple of young thieves had a REALLY bad day.
Kenneth Johnson
Calgary, Alberta
Canada
P.S. – the police contacted us a couple of weeks later to let us know that they had no news regarding our stolen property. I told the police that we were not worried about it any longer, and we told the insurance company that our stuff was just cheap and replaceable. We have not recieved a check from them yet.
There has been some recent noise regarding Google’s stock price, and earnings. Some say that Google’s stock is overpriced and others say that their stock is simply inflated. Some very respected stock market, and business analysts have added to the Internet noise. (read Geoff Colvin’s article, 
Health insurance premiums are filed with, and regulated by your State’s Department of Insurance. Whether you buy from a local health insurance agency, or 
Here is a quick post on the 
If you require some good information on the student loan business, and how you can better yourself, we highly recommend checking out 
Read up Your Credit Report
Columbia University has reached a settlement with New York State's attorney general over student loan practices that will require the school to pay $1.1 million into an educational fund and submit to monitoring of its financial aid procedures.
From the old article archive of Auto Loan 4u
This is a good 5 piece bit of info on borrowing money for all the wrong reasons. Good financial advice to heed. Take a close read of bad borrowing item #3. There are many pitfalls when borrowing money. If you can, try to only borrow when you buy a home or car. Even better, forget about the car and borrow just for the house or condo. 
Story on a Treasury Department official who verbally went after subprime lenders for their risky lending tactic. 