Sputnik 11

One day not too long ago I was sitting in front of a café helping out a consulting client of mine. I was performing coffee shop user acceptance testing, in which I pay people $10 to try an app. (Sidebar: I am amazed that so few entrepreneurs do this. I guess that they’re deathly afraid that people will tell them that their baby is ugly. But this is a topic for another day and another post.)

1. I was typing away on my laptop when a man ran by at full speed and grabbed the computer by its screen. It took me a second or two to figure out what was happening—Is this a joke?—before I took off after the perpetrator. Yes, I left all my other stuff (2 phones and another computer) on the table.
2. He was wearing a lemon yellow windbreaker. Pretty distinctive, right? Well, the location that I picked had lots of small streets, turns, and potential exit routes. I kept track of him through the first corner, but by the time I rounded the second, there was nobody matching that description. It was almost as if he had done this before, and he knew that I would fixate on his jacket…
   
3. He kept the laptop open, presumably so he wouldn’t have to deal with login passwords.
4. I was sitting down, and he was running full speed. As we have already established, he does this for a living. The last time I ran anywhere was to make it to an ice cream parlor before it closed. Who do you think is going to win this race?
5. When you encounter a street, you at least wait for a gap in traffic before you jaywalk, right? Not this guy. He’s going to jail if he gets caught, so he is motivated. My motivation is to protect my stu—wait a minute, I left most of my stuff back in front of the café. Maybe I should make sure that it’s OK. Huh: by not stealing all my stuff, the guy reduced my motivation to chase after him. When I returned, half a dozen people were guarding my things.

And that, my friends, is how you steal a laptop.

What I’ll Do Next Time

• Turn on Find My Mac, or Find My Device on Windows 10 boxes. Unlike the similar services on your phone, these are not enabled by default. Do this now.
• Backups. But you already know that.
• Don’t call 911. I did, and not a single cop passed by in the seventy-five minutes I waited. (I get that more serious crimes take precedence, but the dispatcher implied that someone was coming, and that I should wait.) When I called back, the dispatcher suggested that I just go to the police station the next morning. Since I was only doing it to satisfy the demands of my employer’s insurance carrier, this was fine with me.
• Draw attention to the crime: I should have yelled “Thief!” It’s crazy suspicious to be running through traffic with an open laptop, and people knew exactly what he was doing, but it only dawned on them
  a moment after he has passed them. They would have helped if I had shaken them out of their coma, but I was in a coma, too. That’s what this guy was relying upon. Like I said, he was good at his job.

Alternate strategy: negotiate with the thieves, and get them on camera.

P.S. This is what it takes to break the multi-year silence on my blog. Was it worth the wait?
P.P.S. And what do you think of my clickbait headline?