How I Recovered My Stolen iPad
July 28, 2013 11:51 AM   Subscribe

How I Recovered My Stolen iPad - in which Facebook, Twitter, and Find my iPad work in tandem to find a doofus.
posted by nevercalm (159 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
She didn't know where her iPad was for a long weekend? Then adopted her idea of a patois to lure the man out of some personal information?
posted by Apropos of Something at 12:10 PM on July 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


Wow. I know he had her property and she had the right to try to get it back, but that was just way too contemptuous and gloating. "It hurt me to type (like he did)"? Pretending to be a single mom workin at CVS because that's what his Facebook friends were? I'm with the cops on this on, if some lady sailed into my station with a stack of info on a suspect in an ipad theft case, I'd be freaked out too.
posted by subdee at 12:12 PM on July 28, 2013 [5 favorites]


Like geeze lady, the theft wasn't personal so why you gotta be so personal about your response? The thief didn't seem particularly stupid to me either - he knew enough to turn off the location-sharing feature of Find My Ipad. What I'm getting out of this is don't rename stolen ipads because thee original owner can see the new name. Also be careful about who you friend on twitteer and facebook, some of them migt be out to get you.
posted by subdee at 12:16 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


Yeah, this is extremely classist, self-righteous, and condescending. Especially because she was not actually robbed -- as far as I can tell she forgot her iPad at a cafe and then didn't even notice for several days.
posted by oinopaponton at 12:17 PM on July 28, 2013 [14 favorites]


I'm inclined to agree the author was a little obnoxious, but on the other hand, this guy was a total jerk. Maybe it wasn't personal, but he knew it was her iPad, and whether he stole it from her or found it there later, it wasn't his. And I'm not going to give him a pass just because the victim of the theft (or the person who lost her stuff) is crowing about this.
posted by jenlovesponies at 12:21 PM on July 28, 2013 [16 favorites]


If she hadn't walked into the station with a stack of papers, the cops would have "taken a report", told her it was long gone by now, and been done. It's not like their iPad Theft Division would have gotten right on it.
posted by ceribus peribus at 12:24 PM on July 28, 2013 [33 favorites]


It was hers, it was stolen by his girlfriend, he clearly knew it belonged to someone else when he renamed it, he declined to answer when she asked him nicely to meet to return it. I think her anger is understandable even if her classism isn't. Good for her for getting it back in a reasonably civilized way.
posted by bearwife at 12:28 PM on July 28, 2013 [28 favorites]


Is there any evidence that it was stolen, or is it possible she just forgot it at the café and an unscrupulous barista picked it up? I mean, sucks to lose your iPad, and at best the barista behaved unethically by not reporting it, but this wasn't necessarily a premeditated crime.
posted by deathpanels at 12:30 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


The way that iOS devices stay can stay linked even when they change hands can lead to a lot of weirdness.

A number of months back, I was mugged and my iPhone was stolen. I changed my passwords, dissociated it from my Apple account, and and got a new iPhone. Then, a couple of months later, I started getting another person's pictures in my photostream. I have no idea why this is happening: the phone should be completely divorced from my account. I never updated iOS on that phone and it did not have photostream on it; my best guess is that when the phone got updated and needed to set up a photostream, it looked for the last account that it had been tied to.

The pictures are voyeuristically amazing. As far as I can tell, my stolen phone is in Yemen now, owned by a young man who takes a lot of selfies with a wad of qat tucked into his cheek. He either helps work on a qat field or just visits one from time to time. He takes a lot of pictures of his family: an older man sleeping on the couch, children in ceremonial garb playing in rubble. But most of the images are screenshots of Facebook. Sometimes these are of messages that are in a language I can't read, but they are usually of images that his friends have posted. A lot of the pictures are of bales of money, bales of drugs, solid gold machine guns, jeeps and tanks, racist caricatures of Obama, and propagandish pictures of Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, amidst these are plenty of pictures of unicorns, flowers, and cute little kittens lying under rainbows. It's a bizarre look into a world that is entirely unlike my own.
posted by painquale at 12:32 PM on July 28, 2013 [122 favorites]


There's more from her if you scroll way down and click to see the hidden comments. (It seems that most comments that are not in the "You're awesome!" vein are being downvoted into the shadows.)

She answers, re: the guy's potential innocence:

"Maybe, maybe.

Except that he didn't respond to my Facebook message asking for it back, even when he was sending other Facebook messages.

The cops reported to the cafe that the boyfriend had my iPad to the cafe. The cafe made the choice to fire her.

Regardless of who was innocent or guilty (and I'm pretty sure they were both guilty), the direct way (asking for it back) was not getting my iPad back. Should I not have gone to the police and therefore not gotten my iPad back because one of them might be innocent?"

She also says:

"Nope, he didn't care. I didn't call him since I was able to facebook message me (and he wasn't responding).

It didn't really matter if both of them were guilty. One of them certainly was, and that was the only way to get my iPad back. There were no charges pressed against them (other than the girl getting fired)."
posted by shortfuse at 12:37 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


that was just way too contemptuous and gloating

Thieves deserve contempt for their actions, and I'd gloat too if I turned the tables on someone who stole a several hundred dollar item from me.

the theft wasn't personal

Every theft is personal to the victim.

I think she did great work. As ceribus peribus posted, she pretty much had to do the legwork for the police, because they wouldn't have done anything otherwise. Usually the best you can hope for is proof you filed a complaint so you can make an insurance claim or whatever.
posted by Sternmeyer at 12:38 PM on July 28, 2013 [34 favorites]


I'm leaning towards, this whole thing is made up as self-promotion.
posted by iotic at 12:40 PM on July 28, 2013 [5 favorites]


I hope you all don't try to steal anything from me. It would take me a week to print out the stack of files on some of you...
posted by Nanukthedog at 12:42 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


Finding someone's valuable item and failing to take reasonable steps to identify the owner can be seen as theft by finding. Taking active steps to impede the owner's recovery of the object and failing to return it on request makes things look not just unethical but potentially criminal.
posted by grouse at 12:43 PM on July 28, 2013 [6 favorites]


Is there any evidence that it was stolen, or is it possible she just forgot it at the café and an unscrupulous barista picked it up? I mean, sucks to lose your iPad, and at best the barista behaved unethically by not reporting it, but this wasn't necessarily a premeditated crime.

Taking something that doesn't belong to you is stealing. This wasn't an unidentifiable $10 bill on the sidewalk. This is a iPad, presumably left at a cafe and found by an employee. When something like this happens, you are supposed to turn it in to your manager who will try to identify the customer who owns it. You are not supposed to take it home and give it to your boyfriend. Just because it wasn't premeditated doesn't mean it wasn't stolen. We even have a phrase for this, "crime of opportunity." The barista behaved unethically by not reporting it. The barista also behaved unethically by stealing it.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 12:43 PM on July 28, 2013 [36 favorites]


I knew I could count on Metafilter to defend thieves. I think we can all agree that the blogger's condescension towards a semi-literate in possession of her property is the real crime here. She used her privilege (cue gasps, audience catcalls) to get the fascist police to threaten a poor innocent guilty of nothing more than possessing stolen property.
posted by atrazine at 12:44 PM on July 28, 2013 [74 favorites]


I have been the victim of a break in resulting in the loss of all my professional gear (10 basses and guitars), a yard robbery resulting in the theft of my fully restored antique scooter, a robbery at a gig, a van break-in losing me the most valuable piece of gear I've ever owned, and an attempted mugging for my phone at knife-point (who I disarmed and chased off). Despite police reports and serial numbers the only thing recovered was the scooter--after a friend spotted it I called the cops no tell them where it was (with a case number). I went to the site expecting to meet the police but after it became evident they weren't showing up anytime soon, I had to steal it back with some force.

So no, I don't expect the police to ever recover anything. If I ever hope to see something again I'll have to take the initiative like she did.

Good on her. I fucking hate thieves.
posted by sourwookie at 12:46 PM on July 28, 2013 [24 favorites]


the theft wasn't personal?
Whenever your possessions get vandalized or stolen, it's personal.

She did good.
posted by wester at 12:46 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


I think the work she did was great. I think the way she described it was far, far from great and she seems like an asshole who got her stolen ipad back, which is good, because even assholes don't deserve to be stolen from.
posted by jeather at 12:47 PM on July 28, 2013 [18 favorites]


All of these people suck. McDowell because she's just outed herself as exactly the kind of over-caffeinated, easily-distractible upper-class twit who can misplace a $500+ personal computer and then not notice it for a couple of days. Cappa because he apparently didn't think twice when his girlfriend gave him an iPad that she "found" someplace. Cappa's girlfriend because she didn't have the good sense to realize that somebody was probably going to miss that iPad (even if the owner was a goldfish-brained moron).

I've worked a bunch of service gigs that partially entailed cleaning up after relatively well-to-do patrons, and there were more than a few occasions when I happened upon a fairly substantial amount of dropped money (large bills, credit/gift cards) or semi-expensive gear (Phones, PDAs, etc). The first thing I did in each of these instances was report it to my manager on duty. In the case of money/cards, those went into the store safe with a clearly-written note wrapped around them, and a message went into the MOD log in the event that somebody came looking for it; In the case of phones/PDAs, we would do the same thing, along with placing a call to the number in the address book labeled "HOME." It's not hard to do, and in the rare occasions that nobody showed up to claim some misplaced cash, my employers were generally kind enough to give the finder dibs on it. I actually paid for my college books one semester using a couple of $100s that I found between seats while ushering at a movie theater during the summer.

I'm leaning towards, this whole thing is made up as self-promotion.

This. One detail that causes me to question the entire narrative: How did McDowell get Cappa's friends to FB-friend her? Do people really friend random strangers with unfamiliar names in real life? Is that a thing that actual humans do?
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:51 PM on July 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


I'm kinda appalled by all the people here condemning this. Her opinion of the thief wasn't respectful enough so she was like, totally kinda a douche too and you don't really like her?

Why the fuck was she supposed to have any respect for this guy, or his potentially involved girlfriend? Theft by finding has already been mentioned, and she deserved to get fired if she found something at the place she worked and kept it. I work in the office of a cafe, and we have lost and found bins at our store specifically for this type of situation. Employees can eventually take unclaimed things after some real time goes by(see: months) but anyone caught just straight away taking stuff would be in serious trouble.

I'm just a little befuddled by how quickly everyone turned on her here. Real life is not elementary school, and hell elementary school didn't even work that way. "Finders keepers losers weepers" is not a real thing. This guy knew he had someone elses stuff and ignored that fact, and even tried to cover it up(changing the name, etc)

I've also had several similar experiences to sourwookie above with the police being utterly useless in situations like this. Including my bike getting stolen right out of my house, my laptop getting stolen(also out of my old house!), and other things.

Anything i recovered pretty much involved a story much like the one recounted here involving essentially internet espionage/social engineering for info gathering and to figure out how to act, and what my chances of recovering the item were.

I'm so very sorry that she isn't a lovable cuddly narrator here, or that her attitude isn't making you happy. But that doesn't make her the bad guy or some sort of Veruca Salt character here.

Is she not allowed to be a bit proud and victory-lappish? That's definitely how i felt after i recovered my stuff from shitheads.
posted by emptythought at 12:54 PM on July 28, 2013 [21 favorites]


Do people really friend random strangers with unfamiliar names in real life? Is that a thing that actual humans do?

Yes. Especially if their profiles appear to be attractive young women. I have gotten friend requests from people who I had no knowledge of but had some mutual friends in common, according to Facebook. I asked those friends how they knew her and they said that now that they thought about it, they didn't really know her.
posted by grouse at 12:56 PM on July 28, 2013 [5 favorites]


You nailed it, she is Veruca Salt.
posted by Brocktoon at 12:57 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


Then I am truly an alien visitor to the world of social networking.
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:58 PM on July 28, 2013


Taking something that doesn't belong to you is stealing. ... This is a iPad, presumably left at a cafe and found by an employee. When something like this happens, you are supposed to turn it in to your manager who will try to identify the customer who owns it.

Your identification of corporate policy with actual law is revealing more about you than about the case.
posted by DU at 12:59 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


She gets to gloat. You better believe I gloated when I got to tell my friends how I left that asshole on the pavement holding his jaw as I drove off on my antique with the wiring hanging out of the ignition. Even if he didn't steal it, he knew it was stolen.
posted by sourwookie at 1:00 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


She doesn't have to respect the thief. But she acts as if the reason she disrespects the thief is that he is so much lower class than her. Spelling mistakes, eww. We better find an unclassy photo for him.

The thieves were assholes too, but having your ipad stolen -- taking a forgotten ipad from the cafe where you work counts as stealing -- doesn't turn you into a non-asshole.
posted by jeather at 1:01 PM on July 28, 2013 [7 favorites]


Is there any evidence that it was stolen, or is it possible she just forgot it at the café and an unscrupulous barista picked it up? I mean, sucks to lose your iPad, and at best the barista behaved unethically by not reporting it, but this wasn't necessarily a premeditated crime.

I think the most likely explanation is that she did forget it at the cafe. She didn't notice it was missing for some time, and when she found out about the cafe link she realized that was the last place she remembered having it.

That means she was using it at the cafe, then left the cafe without realizing she no longer had it in her possession. So either she used it, put it in her bag and then someone took it out of her bag, or she just left it behind. The latter seems more likely.

I agree it was definitely 100% wrong to take it and make no effort to find the owner (which would have been much easier than say anonymous possession like a watch) and I'm not making any excuses for the barista, but failing to return a lost item is, in my opinion, a lesser sin than deliberately taking something from someone.
posted by justkevin at 1:02 PM on July 28, 2013


Failing to return a lost item—especially when finding the owner would be trivially easy, and the item was lost at your place of employment—is deliberately taking something from someone.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:04 PM on July 28, 2013 [12 favorites]


but failing to return a lost item is, in my opinion, a lesser sin than deliberately taking something from someone.

Finding something like a bike or watch in the woods, maybe-if it's not possible to trace. But this device has an ID and IS ITSELF the actual medium for the owner to contact the finder. If the finder ignores/refuses/denies opportunities to contact the owner, they're a fucking thief. Period.
posted by sourwookie at 1:08 PM on July 28, 2013 [10 favorites]


I'm not making any excuses for the barista, but failing to return a lost item is, in my opinion, a lesser sin than deliberately taking something from someone.

It's likely someone turned in the iPad in good faith, to get it back to the owner. And the barista made no such effort.

I recently had my vehicle broken into for my Nexus 10. They even pepper sprayed my dog who then jumped out my broken window, wandered downtown, looking for me. Thieves can rot in hell, this guy got off easy.
posted by vaportrail at 1:09 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


I guess i just fail to see how her being an asshole makes it cool for everyone to go "Well meh, they both suck, it's just asshole-on-asshole violence so to speak".

One person is an asshole, the other one is a deny-til-you-die thief. It's like saying that someone assaulting someone else isn't as bad as it seems at first glance because the other person was listening to shitty music on a boombox.

And yes, i did read the post. The way she describes him, and the whole "it pains me to write this way" thing is grating and eye-rolly, but i'm not just getting these "lol entitled brat needs to shut the fuck up" things here.

If she was so entitled and wrong, why did the police bother to help her? They don't even help in most actual theft cases where someone robs your house or shit like that.

I also just don't buy that taking the ipad home from work is somehow a "lesser evil", it's just a wimpier evil. It's still stealing, but stealing thinking "oh, they left this here. they'll have no way of knowing who took it and wonder exactly when/where they lost track of it!". It's just theft with more cover built in. ipads don't just magically appear places, that woman knew it belonged to someone who had been at her work(which is seriously, the dumbest place to steal shit at, what the fuck) and she took it anyways assuming that would be the end of it. It's pretty much a calculated risk thing, along the lines of "There's 1000 cookies in this jar, and the person with the jar left. If i take just one or two they wont notice". Finding something in this type of scenario and going "OH! mine now!" is still theft, just with some cover.

The continued choruses of "Well she was dumb for leaving it there so she doesn't deserve as much sympathy" seem to keep trying to reframe this discussion away from the fact that the girlfriend and guy both suck pretty damn hard here. And it's weird that everyone is soooo focused on that.
posted by emptythought at 1:10 PM on July 28, 2013 [6 favorites]


I mean the only reason this was posted was because of how gross the author makes herself sound right? Because we see one of these iOS enabled theft recovery stories once a month, at least.

Man bites dog.
posted by danny the boy at 1:12 PM on July 28, 2013


Don't Facebook messages from people you're not friends with go into some obscure mailbox that hardly anyone ever checks? She seems to assume that he's actually read her messages there.
posted by exogenous at 1:13 PM on July 28, 2013 [5 favorites]


Incidentally, this is why I passcode-lock all of my iDevices. I would rather lose the device altogether than allow some stranger to troll through my data. (I use my iPad at work, and some of the files I carry around with me are sensitive.)
posted by SPrintF at 1:15 PM on July 28, 2013


DU, I'll put my lawyer pants on for you then. It is the law (sometimes called "the law of finders" if you're interested) that someone who locates a piece of mislaid property in another's premises must turn that item over to the operator of the premises for the true owner to collect later. Most states have statutes making this a crime equivalent to theft. See, for example, Oregon. Happy? Now we not argue any more about whether what happened was merely a moral failing as opposed to a crime.
posted by 1adam12 at 1:16 PM on July 28, 2013 [14 favorites]


California has a law regarding how finders of lost property should behave and the circumstances under which they can claim ownership of the lost property. There may have been a local ordinance in place that modifies this State statute, but assuming there was not, here in relevant part is the law and a citation:



Citation: CA CIVIL § 2080 - 2082

...

Summary: This statutory section comprises California's lost property laws.

§ 2080. Duties of finder

Any person who finds a thing lost is not bound to take charge of it, unless the person is otherwise required to do so by contract or law, but when the person does take charge of it he or she is thenceforward a depositary for the owner, with the rights and obligations of a depositary for hire. Any person or any public or private entity that finds and takes possession of any money, goods, things in action, or other personal property, or saves any domestic animal from harm, neglect, drowning, or starvation, shall, within a reasonable time, inform the owner, if known, and make restitution without compensation, except a reasonable charge for saving and taking care of the property. Any person who takes possession of a live domestic animal shall provide for humane treatment of the animal. (emphasis added)

[Also, what 1adam12 said.]
posted by JimInLoganSquare at 1:23 PM on July 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


Your identification of corporate policy with actual law is revealing more about you than about the case.

This isn't about corporate policy. It's about returning lost personal property to people, rather than taking advantage of a mistake they made.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 1:24 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


Even though he was on Facebook at the time, he didn't respond to my message. Hmph!

Facebook Pro Tip: If you message someone you aren't friends with, they probably won't see it.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 1:38 PM on July 28, 2013 [5 favorites]


DU: Your identification of corporate policy with actual law is revealing more about you than about the case.

I think we can all agree that the above is the stupidest sentence to come out of this whole affair.
posted by spaltavian at 1:40 PM on July 28, 2013 [29 favorites]


It's seldom long between demonstrations that to ASSUME makes an ASS of U & ME.
posted by exogenous at 1:48 PM on July 28, 2013


Why was her iPad not protected with a PIN?
posted by lungtaworld at 1:51 PM on July 28, 2013


Why was her iPad not protected with a PIN?

In the downvoted-thus-hidden comments, she is asked this, and she says (1) she doesn't like the hassle of the password, and (2) it doesn't matter because she's not worried about random people accessing her emails - so it's not an issue in this case anyway.

It's odd. I'd be pretty worried about emails, passwords, etc.
posted by shortfuse at 1:59 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Facebook Pro Tip: If you message someone you aren't friends with, they probably won't see it.

While this is true, it's completely counterintuitive and basically no one knows it works that way. It also didn't work that way as recently as oh, early last year? maybe 2011? I distinctly remember sending and receiving messages this way less than 24 months ago, possibly even more recently.

Why was her iPad not protected with a PIN?

Very few people do this. I know maybe 1-2 people with PINs besides myself who aren't using a phone provided by or linked to a corporate network/exchange server or otherwise required to have a pin for some reason.

It's not really all that unusual to not have one. And it's a completely faux layer of protection anyways when the person could just put your iDevice in recovery or DFU mode and essentially format+reinstall the operating system as a blank slate in less than 10 minutes.
posted by emptythought at 2:00 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


I guess i just fail to see how her being an asshole makes it cool for everyone to go "Well meh, they both suck, it's just asshole-on-asshole violence so to speak".

Because the thief didn't decide to write a blog post crowing about the whole affair in a condescending manner. Hard to root for the good guys when the good guys are being smug jerks.
posted by billyfleetwood at 2:02 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's better that people don't protect their phones with pins or passwords. Otherwise, how would I get into my friends' FB accounts to post ridiculous stuff, text their mothers with crazy photos and generally digitally mess with their lives? That's pretty much the only reason I have a fairly complicated password on my phone....I work with adult children.
posted by nevercalm at 2:02 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


it's a completely faux layer of protection anyways when the person could just put your iDevice in recovery or DFU mode and essentially format+reinstall the operating system as a blank slate in less than 10 minutes.

This is true, but it's surprising at least anecdotally how many people don't know this and think that renaming the device is sufficient. As I understand it, this will no longer be possible under iOS7.
posted by sourwookie at 2:03 PM on July 28, 2013


/It's not really all that unusual to not have one. And it's a completely faux layer of protection anyways when the person could just put your iDevice in recovery or DFU  mode and essentially format+reinstall the operating system as a blank slate in less than 10 minutes.

I would think it might deter casual theft; for instance if you forget it at the coffee shop, and it shows a PIN screen, that might mean the barista leaves it in the lost and found, rather than giving it to her technically unsophisticated boyfriend who doesn't know to turn Find My iPad off, and is probably unlikely to know about firmware updates. And then if you ever notice it missing from your heap of electronics, the coffee shop will still have it, you won't need to go on the police, and you won't wind up writing a blog post that accidentally reveals the depth of your contempt for the lower classes.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 2:14 PM on July 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


For want of a PIN, the kingdom was lost.
posted by JimInLoganSquare at 2:26 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


I was rooting for Cali Cappa, shame about his girlfriend's job. Also, in her message exchange with the guy she types with just as much abbreviation and slang as he does.
posted by codacorolla at 2:31 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]




This is a class thing, through and through. The worst thing that could happen to Cappa and the girlfriend is a years or decades long downward spiral through this country's broken two-tier racist classist legal system. The worst case for Mrs. McDowell is that she'd have to pony up for another iPad, which apparently she seems fully capable of affording, with no problems.

After having read though this, I would have to say I would vastly prefer being friends with Cali Cappa and his barista girlfriend than with the smug, condescending and privileged likes of Gayle Laakman McDowell.

I say that, and I think they stole the the iPad. Yes, they shouldn't have done that... Or at least, they should have been better at covering their tracks.
posted by KHAAAN! at 2:33 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Yes, the old "they'll never miss it" justification for theft. You have very poor taste in friends.
posted by smidgen at 2:36 PM on July 28, 2013 [8 favorites]


Sometimes it astonishes me how many borderline sociopaths frequent this website.

What do you mean?
posted by codacorolla at 2:39 PM on July 28, 2013


So if the thief had been someone of her same socio-economic class, would that have made her actions better or worse?

I would vastly prefer being friends with Cali Cappa

It's not like you have to choose either or, you can opt for neither. But if you do go for Cali, you might want to remember to count the spoons.

Sometimes it astonishes me how many borderline sociopaths frequent this website.

Hey! That's - well, something-ist.
posted by IndigoJones at 2:39 PM on July 28, 2013


Wow! "Class thing", eh? She located her iPad, asked for it back and was ignored. So the "classy thing" for her to have done was to take no further action since this Cappa character is a poor oppressed victim of the evils of our capitalist and racist society?

Quite the ride you've gone on there!
posted by stirfry at 2:41 PM on July 28, 2013


Defending theft with some misbegotten "fuck the bourgeois" sentiment.

Please explain to me how that's "borderline sociopathic".
posted by codacorolla at 2:50 PM on July 28, 2013


Wow! "Class thing", eh? She located her iPad, asked for it back and was ignored. So the "classy thing" for her to have done was to take no further action since this Cappa character is a poor oppressed victim of the evils of our capitalist and racist society?

No, the classy thing would have been to do the same thing, but to write up the story without the creepy statements about spelling and an appropriately tacky photo.
posted by jeather at 2:55 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


Well, at least it's indicative of some kind of moral code, however inane. That's where the "borderline" comes in.

What?
posted by codacorolla at 2:56 PM on July 28, 2013


Sometimes these Metafilter discussions end up in places I would've never imagined.
posted by MoxieProxy at 2:57 PM on July 28, 2013 [15 favorites]


Taking something that doesn't belong to you is stealing.

Wait now, take that to its logical conclusion and people would be leaving their stuff everywhere, and saying "Don't you touch that iPad I left in your restaurant, you thief. Leave it there until I come back for it."

Neither side approached this with any degree of kindness. It's a complicated situation; ideas of ownership are a lot less clear than you might think. He probably should have responded to her first Facebook message, but on the other hand, it was a person he didn't know, making a claim on something his girlfriend had offered him as a gift. As for it having a previous owner, pawn shops exist, you know.

Still, it is best that she got the thing back.

Oh, and on the "Metafilter defending thieves" comment above: thanks a lot for your unthinking categorization of the entire userbase.
posted by JHarris at 2:59 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Meeting an asshole is not justification for being an asshole.
posted by Apropos of Something at 3:01 PM on July 28, 2013


Taking something that doesn't belong to you is stealing.

Wait now, take that to its logical conclusion and people would be leaving their stuff everywhere, and saying "Don't you touch that iPad I left in your restaurant, you thief. Leave it there until I come back for it."


But is that the logical conclusion? I don't see anything contradictory in saying both, "don't take things that don't belong to you." AND "don't leave your stuff unattended, someone might walk off with it."
posted by ActingTheGoat at 3:05 PM on July 28, 2013


This is a class thing, through and through. The worst thing that could happen to Cappa and the girlfriend is a years or decades long downward spiral through this country's broken two-tier racist classist legal system. The worst case for Mrs. McDowell is that she'd have to pony up for another iPad, which apparently she seems fully capable of affording, with no problems.

After having read though this, I would have to say I would vastly prefer being friends with Cali Cappa and his barista girlfriend than with the smug, condescending and privileged likes of Gayle Laakman McDowell.


I don't know any of these people, so who knows? I know which one of them I'd turn my back on if my ipad was on the table, that's for sure.
posted by atrazine at 3:12 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


In an ironic (yes I mean ironic) twist, I was reading this thread immediately before I left to go to the library, where my iPhone was stolen. I wrestled my double stroller containing one infant and one potty-training toddler into the library restroom. I didn't realize I had left my phone on top of the toilet paper dispenser in the stall until three minutes later in the kids book area. I lugged my younger progeny back to the restroom at top speed but it was gone. I rush to the front desk but no one had turned it in and when they called it for me it was already turned off. Too late. Now I am wondering whether it was the nice lady who held the door open for me? Was it one of the ten teenagers waiting for the test prep class? I logged onto iCloud at the library computers and put it into 'lost' mode, called Verizon and cut off service. I am really really sad. I used my phone sixty times a day and now I can't text my husband while he is gone this week.

From this perspective, what she did seems really clever, and I sure hope whoever stole my phone is just as easy to track down. And yes I consider it stealing even though I happened to leave it in the bathroom by mistake. I took it out of my pocket so it wouldn't fall in the toilet when I peed, not as a donation to the next person to use the handicapped stall.

In short, if you find an iPhone 4 with a blue Star Trek logo case, please me mail me.
posted by bq at 3:15 PM on July 28, 2013 [21 favorites]


I'm still really confused as to why there's any onus, or even motive to be nice to someone in this situation.

Your thing disappeared, now it reappeared with someone else who changed the name on it and is acting like it's theirs. Why do you have to treat this person with any modicum of respect?

I feel like there's some weird like, just world fallacy + middle class/upper middle class privilege thing going on here. Both on her part(with the second one at least), and on the part of a number of the posters here.

I just can't get away from the hunch that the vast majority of people responding and poo-pooing on her for "having a shitty attitude and looking down on them" haven't had a lot of this kind of thing intersect with their lives via just cruising along at a high altitude in that sense.

This entire situation seems to be getting heavily freighted with a lot of peoples beliefs ranging from yea, "fuck the bourgeois" to even weirder and honestly somewhat bizarre "i don't like her attitude so she deserves what she got" along with an odd mixture of what was brought up above by stirfry about how they're just poor "victims of the system" and she shouldn't be putting more pressure on the boot on their face or some shit like that.

No one needs a damn iPad*. Stealing something like this is on about the same level as stealing a watch that has the persons name engraved on the back. This was entirely an "ohh shiny i want!" theft of something that's purely for recreational purposes. A lot of people here are defending it like they stole her groceries she left next to her car as if it's some kind of understandable noble act with a side of her being a huge fuckass about it, but this is like stealing a freaking purse and then wearing it.

I'm a fairly compassionate person quick to defend people who are getting shit shoveled on them without proper consideration, or without all the facts, or who just don't deserve it in general. But this seems like a fairly clear cut case of someone stealing something that is entirely a luxury item just because they wanted it, and then when the original owner gets a bit irate everyone chides her in what's essentially a tone argument minus the suggestion of potential better presentation.

*Ok, except maybe those disabled kids mentioned in the other thread who'd use it to communicate. But that's neither here nor there, and completely irrelevant to this discussion about abled people who happen to have overly active metaphorical assholes and seem to be able to communicate just fine.

Also, in her message exchange with the guy she types with just as much abbreviation and slang as he does.

This was funny as shit to me too. Either it's some kind of really something-ist "I'll speak to him in his own language!" thing, or she just types exactly like him. Both are cringe-y and hilarious given that she ragged on that.
posted by emptythought at 3:22 PM on July 28, 2013 [14 favorites]


painquaile: pics or it didn't happen!
posted by anewnadir at 3:22 PM on July 28, 2013


The worst thing that could happen to Cappa and the girlfriend is a years or decades long downward spiral through this country's broken two-tier racist classist legal system.

Which sorry fate would be less likely if they could simply do the right thing in the first place.
posted by IndigoJones at 3:24 PM on July 28, 2013 [10 favorites]


It's not really all that unusual to not have one. And it's a completely faux layer of protection anyways when the person could just put your iDevice in recovery or DFU mode and essentially format+reinstall the operating system as a blank slate in less than 10 minutes.

If it's a blank slate they're not getting access to my data. And while I would certainly go to great lengths to get the person fired who stole my mislaid device, I'd worry less about it if they couldn't get access to all of my identifying material.
posted by winna at 3:32 PM on July 28, 2013


...I would certainly go to great lengths to get the person fired who stole my mislaid device

Did you forget to type a "not" in there?
posted by JimInLoganSquare at 3:35 PM on July 28, 2013


I'm with Cappa on this one. Some rich person leaves their expensive electronics strewn across their path then is shocked when someone less fortunate appropriates it.

You leave your shit lying around you lose it. That is the way America works. We only tell people "be nice and give it back" when they can't afford lawyers.
posted by Ad hominem at 3:36 PM on July 28, 2013 [5 favorites]


I'm still really confused as to why there's any onus, or even motive to be nice to someone in this situation.

Your thing disappeared, now it reappeared with someone else who changed the name on it and is acting like it's theirs. Why do you have to treat this person with any modicum of respect?


As someone who lost a Kodak Disc camera in 1986, I think that the ability to track down a lost or stolen phone/laptop/iPad is amazing and I generally like these stories that come out about how someone was able to recover their item.

I don't like this story so much because there is a mean-spirited attitude about, not just the thief, but about the class of people the thief knows. That is, the thief isn't judged just for being a thief, but for knowing a bunch of single moms that work at CVS. When she develops her Facebook profile, she can't find a picture anywhere on the entire internet with a suitable "degree of un-classiness" and is forced into the depths of MySpace. Because we all know what those people are like.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 3:40 PM on July 28, 2013 [10 favorites]


I just can't get away from the hunch that the vast majority of people responding and poo-pooing on her for "having a shitty attitude and looking down on them" haven't had a lot of this kind of thing intersect with their lives via just cruising along at a high altitude in that sense.

They're coming from positions of extreme privilege where all losses of property are either insured against or trivial. The attitude that something is just a property crime which isn't that bad is (ironically in this case) much more likely to be found among the customers than the employees of a coffee shop.

Shrugging off theft as something trivial is a market of class privilege.
posted by atrazine at 3:51 PM on July 28, 2013 [11 favorites]


You leave your shit lying around you lose it. That is the way America works. We only tell people "be nice and give it back" when they can't afford lawyers.

Is this meant ironically? Because if not, then it is a terribly cynical position to take. America (and more specifically to the case cited here, the State of California) operates under the rule of law, including statutory and common law principles that clearly define what happened here as theft (or larceny, or whatever... it's been a while since I passed the bar). Above, I cited the specific California statute that I believe applies in this case. I believe I am not being Pollyanaish to say that we have not yet descended into a state of anarchy. Yes, I live in a big city (Chicago), I am a big boy, and I realize that in reality, the laws are usually unenforceable (or just unenforced). I've been the victim of numerous petty crimes in my life, including to list just a few a break and enter ("smash and grab") on a car and theft of a lawn mower from a locked yard ... and, in fact, I actually also did lose an iPad about a year ago (left it in a parking garage, never saw it again and presume but cannot prove somebody converted it to his/her own use). My home was burglarized twice when I was a child, too. Only in one of these instances was I being careless, but in all of them I was the victim of theft. Should I feel good because I/my family could afford it? Should the thieves in each instance feel good about what they did? Why or why not?
posted by JimInLoganSquare at 3:52 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


I'm with Cappa on this one. Some rich person leaves their expensive electronics strewn across their path then is shocked when someone less fortunate appropriates it.

You leave your shit lying around you lose it. That is the way America works. We only tell people "be nice and give it back" when they can't afford lawyers.
posted by Ad hominem 15 minutes ago [1 favorite +]


No, we tell people that even when they can afford lawyers. And then if they don't, we even pay for them to have lawyers! It's a great system.
posted by bq at 3:55 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Since I was the first person in this thread to come down harder on the poster than the thieves, I'll defend myself a little bit. I don't think theft is right no matter how it's justified (I just found it here, she probably doesn't need it anyway...) Saying she crossed a line whe she FB-stalked the guy and brougt his info to the police was wrong of me, I think.

But theft really isn't personal. And I say that as someone who's had stuff stolen. Once my car was stolen, with every CD I owned in the backseat. Once, I came home early and found a guy who was robbing me and my roommate. He had my roomate's laptop and I didn't know how to stop him walking out of the door with.

When I was growing up, I had neighborhood friends who would come over, and once they took money from my room. When that happened I was madder at my brother for letting them in there while I wasn't there. They also stole videogames from us.

Should I have been mad at my neighborhood friends for stealing from our house after we invited them over all the time? Maybe. We cerainly weren't friends after that. But I think theft is just the reality of what happens when people who have a lot of stuff are in contact with people who don't have a lot of stuff, in a culture that values having stuff. The individuals thieves are wrong but theft is just something that happens to people who have things worth stealing.
posted by subdee at 4:02 PM on July 28, 2013


We only tell people "be nice and give it back" when they can't afford lawyers.

What? Are people who believe this the same ones that believe atheists are serial murderers because they can't hear Jesus saying "nuh-uh-uh"? Some of us actually live by a moral code not exclusively adhered to due to threat and fear.
posted by sourwookie at 4:03 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


By the way, just because someone has an iPad doesn't make them rich. I know someone who works as a nanny and her husband just found a job after 6 months of unemployment, he's in tech support. They have a two year old ipad. Does that make them legitimate targets of theft?

I think I'm being trolled so I will just back off.
posted by bq at 4:06 PM on July 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


So many typos ;_; I tried editing but I'm on a smartphone and just missed the window. What I was trying to explain and didn't say clearly is that theft is a natural side-effect of an unequal society that bills itself as being equal-opportunity.
posted by subdee at 4:12 PM on July 28, 2013


Do people really friend random strangers with unfamiliar names in real life? Is that a thing that actual humans do?

Apparently... there are friend requests on my Facebook account from at least half a dozen people whom I have no clue of who they are; a couple of them have a single friend (acquaintance from my POV) in common with me, the rest have no connection with me at all.

On the other hand, I once inadvertently sent such a request. Years ago, when first on Facebook, I did that thing that most new arrivals do: "Hey, I wonder of so-and-so is on Facebook?" followed by a search and often a friend request. In the case of one coworker from a decade earlier, Tom S________, I searched for his somewhat unusual name and found somebody matching it. The profile photo was a shot of someone climbing a mountain; Tom was an active guy, and though I could not confidently identify him from a tiny five-pixel-tall view of a figure on a vast rock face, I took a chance and sent the request anyway. The following day I saw the message "Tom S_________ accepted your friend request." Later I had a look at Tom's page and saw it was a stranger with the same name. I was curious as to why he accepted the request, but then looking at his page I thought, "I guess you don't get to have 2800 friends by being too picky."
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:13 PM on July 28, 2013


The individuals thieves are wrong but theft is just something that happens to people who have things worth stealing.

And prison is what happens to those that do the stealing. If they're lucky. There's plenty of neighborhoods where stealing someone's things will get you a beating.
posted by atrazine at 4:13 PM on July 28, 2013


This is like claiming that poor people who have refrigerators or tvs or toaster ovens aren't really poor.
posted by bq at 4:14 PM on July 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


I figure Cappa deserves the same treatment a CEO who robs his workers' pension plan gets. That is to say a pat on the back and a bonus for maximizing shareholder value.

The only flaw in Cappa's plan was that he failed to incorporate, hire lobbyists, and mount a competent PR campaign.
posted by Ad hominem at 4:15 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


"Theft is just something that happens to people who have things worth stealing" is one of the lines I edited out when I tried to fix the wording of my comment, sigh.
posted by subdee at 4:18 PM on July 28, 2013


The worst case for Mrs. McDowell is that she'd have to pony up for another iPad, which apparently she seems fully capable of affording, with no problems.

I would be interested to hear how you arrived at this conclusion. This sounds to me like a blanket justification for every property crime. "Well, yes, he stole that car, but the owner clearly could afford a car, so he can just buy another." "Okay, she did burn down the garage, but if the owner could afford to build a garage in the first place, he can obviously afford to replace it."
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:23 PM on July 28, 2013 [7 favorites]


This is like claiming that poor people who have refrigerators or tvs or toaster ovens aren't really poor.

I thought we were claiming that I can take that stuff and if you find me and report me to the police you're classist, because taking other people's stuff is just what happens in America, and if you have stuff you must be a privileged bimbo who kinda deserved me taking her stuff in the first place.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 4:27 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


Hey, to all the "theft happens" people in here, where do you live exactly? Where do you hang out? I know not all you guys list locations on your profile. like can i get some info so i can start internet stalking you and figuring out when you aren't home so i can steal your shit?

It sounds too easy! you probably wouldn't even call the cops because it "just happens" right? And hell, i could use some new shit. Or at least the money i'd get from fencing yours.

By the way, just because someone has an iPad doesn't make them rich. I know someone who works as a nanny and her husband just found a job after 6 months of unemployment, he's in tech support. They have a two year old ipad. Does that make them legitimate targets of theft?

Yea, as readily dislikable as she is here, an ipad is in no way a sign of wealth. You can get ipads for under $200 on craigslist now. Even the nicer retina ones are in the mid 300s. Plenty of the people i know who have them(including myself!) are not "rolling in dough" or bougie. That angle of this needs to take a rest unless there's other posts on her blog about doing donuts in her bentley or all the nice new jewelry she got on the trip to belize in her husbands yacht or something.
posted by emptythought at 4:28 PM on July 28, 2013 [7 favorites]


By the way, just because someone has an iPad doesn't make them rich. I know someone who works as a nanny and her husband just found a job after 6 months of unemployment, he's in tech support. 

Hey, maybe your nanny friend is the one who wrote this article. Is she also a Wharton MBA, a former Googler, a dot com CEO, a bestselling author, living in one of the richest cities in America and has so many gadgets that they routinely go missing and she wouldn't notice a missing iPad for days? Because that's the person who wrote this article, and she sounds pretty rich to me.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 4:29 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


wow ok i stand corrected on this lady not being loaded as fuck. still doesn't make stealing her stuff right, but makes me understand the severe classism and peoples general willingness to hate on her here. 1%er and whatnot.
posted by emptythought at 4:31 PM on July 28, 2013


Look, getting your shit stolen sucks. Being a classist asshole who gives off serious condescending vibes towards people who aren't as upper middle class (or better) as them, also sucks, and in the long run probably does more to make life miserable for everyone. And I'm sorry, she totally comes across that way.

When someone tells you a story about how hot shit they are and they end up making themselves look pretty damn unlikeable in the process that says a lot.
posted by aspo at 4:32 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


bq: By the way, just because someone has an iPad doesn't make them rich.

Actually, I think the presumption she is well off is from the fact that she has a piece of equipment worth $400+ that she did not know was lost for many days. I mean, I own an iPad and treat it like a child. And I also have a compulsive behavior pattern of checking if I forgot any of my belongings from any area I've left. So, if you ever see an Asian dude standing up to leave a restaurant, but then looking underneath his table and chair, then looking at his chair, then shuffling around his plates and cups to make sure he didn't leave anything underneath said objects, then that's definitely me.

And I think "finder's keepers" seems to be a thing ingrained in me by my family. A few years ago, my younger brother found a DS Lite and kept it. Every time I see the thing I mock him for basically stealing a child's DS. My dad also has a history of taking parmesan cheese shakers, and small ceramic cups that hold dipping sauce in restaurants.

I try to empathize and return stuff when I find it. But sometimes I know if I turn it in, neither me nor the owner will ever see it again. I don't know if that's temptation talking or just pragmatism.
posted by FJT at 4:36 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


This is blowin' my mind a little. If we start with the idea that "If someone can afford [x], then they deserve to be relieved of it" - then how do we justify owning anything at all?
posted by ftm at 4:42 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


> I think the presumption she is well off is from the fact that she has a piece of equipment worth $400+ that she did not know was lost for many days. I mean, I own an iPad and treat it like a child

I own an iPad and since I don't use it every day, it could easily be missing for a while without my noticing. Not everyone uses equipment the same way. Not too much should be read into that one fact.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:53 PM on July 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


All property is theft, ftm. But theft, as we've learned today, is hunky-dory. So there you go.
posted by hydrophonic at 4:54 PM on July 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


Geez, I had a bass that I play for piece of my livelihood stolen this year that I didn't notice was gone for several days because I wasn't perpetually obsessing over it like Gollum and the One Ring.
posted by sourwookie at 4:56 PM on July 28, 2013 [17 favorites]


Geez, I had a bass that I play for piece of my livelihood stolen this year that I didn't notice was gone for several days because I wasn't perpetually obsessing over it like Gollum and the One Ring.

I guess this is a foreign concept to me. To me, if you value something (in terms of money or sentimentality or something else) you are aware of it quite often. Note, it doesn't mean one has to use it daily, but it would mean there's an awareness of the status of the object almost daily.
posted by FJT at 5:07 PM on July 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


I sometimes know where, for instance, a favourite piece of jewelery is and then go look for it to realise that I was wrong and didn't know after all. I'm really impressed with people who have never forgotten or lost anything important.
posted by jeather at 5:10 PM on July 28, 2013


The ridiculous straw men floating around aside, it's fascinating to me that someone would miss the mark so badly when describing what happened to them that I have to keep reminding myself that they are the victim of a crime. She thinks she's coming across like Sherlock Holmes, but to me see seems to have wound up somewhere between Mr. Burns and Lucille Bluth.

I also wonder if Cali Cappa and others of his socioeconomic status and skin colour also get two hour service when they walk into a Palo Alto police station with evidence that someone stole something of theirs.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 5:10 PM on July 28, 2013 [5 favorites]


Being a classist asshole who gives off serious condescending vibes towards people who aren't as upper middle class are fucking thieves

Fixed that for ya.

If y'all would still rather hang out with the wanna-be gangster criminal, have at it. Be warned that he might need to borrow some "police get out my face money" from time to time. (If it's classist to think that this is some annoying-as-hell colloquializing, then fine, I'm that.)
posted by ShutterBun at 5:14 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


This is an interesting thread. Obviously, some people on MeFi are incapable of viewing things through anything but a privilege/oppression lens, but this thread demonstrates that they're in the minority. I'm calling that a win, overall.
posted by smorange at 5:15 PM on July 28, 2013 [7 favorites]


I guess this is a foreign concept to me. To me, if you value something (in terms of money or sentimentality or something else) you are aware of it quite often. Note, it doesn't mean one has to use it daily, but it would mean there's an awareness of the status of the object almost daily.

I suspect this kind of thinking, being hyper aware of where objects are located, is a trait of a specific sort of brain. It has little to do with how much one values objects.

I have no proof of this, just anecdotal "data" based on observing how people relate to the things they care about.

Memory and observation all come into play. Sometimes I "know" an object I value is in a particular drawer. I know it in my bones, so there's no need for me to check. And yet when I finally look, it's not there. This is because I've forgotten something or failed to observe something. It has nothing to do with the value I place on the object.

In general, we should be careful about linking external behavior with guesses about how much someone values something (an internal state). It's impossible to completely avoid that, but we should always be ready to revise out guesses.

I remember, so often, as a kid, being told, "I guess it wasn't all that important to you," when I'd admitted I forgot was I was going to say. This was almost always wrong. I am just as apt to forget to say important things as trivial things.

More to the point, I'm somewhat ashamed to say that my iPhone is deeply important to me. I know that's something only a privileged person could say, and maybe it means my priorities are screwed up, but it's true. I've come to rely on it for ... almost everything. And yet, even though it's that important to me, and even though I often can't afford to replace it, I lose it almost every day. Most days for me involve at least one panicked search and a trip to Find My iPhone. I'm simply absent minded and easily distracted.

It's easy to distract me from the things that are important to me.
posted by grumblebee at 5:18 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


It's easy to distract me from the things that are important to me.

This is true. I was going to say this is more of a testament of me being able to forget things I've lost. However, I did just remember I lost a pair of cufflinks a decade ago given to me by the Australian Consulate. Which is odd, because I wouldn't really give away or lose things like that.
posted by FJT at 5:27 PM on July 28, 2013


Be warned that he might need to borrow some "police get out my face money" from time to time.

I thought only the rich could afford to bribe the police. Or are you talking about bail? Or are you saying that usually poor people are harassed by the police? I'm confused.
posted by FJT at 5:29 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


I got two buildings broken into this week. Stole a lawn mower, stole a bike, maybe stole some other stuff of lesser value I can't tell because of the utter ransacked mess they left behind.

Fuck it. I get to be rude to the asshole who took my stuff. And take yourself to hell if you think different.
posted by dhartung at 5:59 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


I get to be rude to the asshole who took my stuff spoke truth to power

FTFY. Like, how many things with wheels do you really need, man?
posted by obiwanwasabi at 6:08 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Fuck it. I get to be rude to the asshole who took my stuff. And take yourself to hell if you think different.

I'm still mad at this guy who shorted us a couple of times on a group dinner check. He never got confronted about it (we realized much afterwards what he did), and it's been a year. I still see him from time to time, and all I can do at this point is to be rude to him, because anything else would be excessive.
posted by FJT at 6:13 PM on July 28, 2013


Is there any evidence that it was stolen, or is it possible she just forgot it at the café and an unscrupulous barista picked it up? I mean, sucks to lose your iPad, and at best the barista behaved unethically by not reporting it, but this wasn't necessarily a premeditated crime.

Yeah, this is extremely classist, self-righteous, and condescending. Especially because she was not actually robbed -- as far as I can tell she forgot her iPad at a cafe and then didn't even notice for several days.

Your identification of corporate policy with actual law is revealing more about you than about the case.

We only tell people "be nice and give it back" when they can't afford lawyers.

I was rooting for Cali Cappa, shame about his girlfriend's job.

This is a class thing, through and through. The worst thing that could happen to Cappa and the girlfriend is a years or decades long downward spiral through this country's broken two-tier racist classist legal system. The worst case for Mrs. McDowell is that she'd have to pony up for another iPad, which apparently she seems fully capable of affording, with no problems.

The individuals thieves are wrong but theft is just something that happens to people who have things worth stealing.

Comments in the vein of "Classist scum! How dare you make fun of Cali Cappa!" comments are one of the few things that really annoy me about MeFi.

People who feel like the victim is "gloating" and shouldn't have taken such measures because she is in a position to forget about an iPad for a few days are sending the wrong message. Patronizing and "standing up" for people like Cali only leads to a further breakdown of civility in our society. We live in a country where people have the opportunity to make something of themselves. If a person chooses to take shortcuts and take things that another person worked for because they are unable to afford them, they are going against the principles of self-determination that this nation is based upon. If Cali wants an iPad, he needs to save up his money, make some sacrifices if needed, and get one. And the fact that he may not be able to afford one because he works a minimum wage job is irrelevant. Owning luxury electronics is not a right, it's a privilege.

In a way, people who are defending Cali Cappa and his girlfriend are the true "classists" because they believe that these two people have no chance of changing the current horrible path his life is on. They don't believe that he has any capacity to be a better person, so scorn should be heaped upon the victim because she dared make him feel bad about himself. He is an unrepentant scoundrel and deserves every terrible thing that happens to him if he takes things he may feel he "deserves to have." His significant other is a thief who is bereft of a moral compass. She sees no problem in stealing the property of a patron of the coffee shop she works at. These people deserve scorn and contempt. They deserve to be unmasked as the terrible people they are to their friends and family, as well as the authorities. At this point, only shaming them will deter this type of anti-social conduct.
posted by reenum at 6:14 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


So, if the guy hadn't returned the iPad when the cops called, what could they actually do about it? If he denied it and then threw the thing in the bay, would they have been able to prosecute him for anything? I'm wondering because it seems like the only "proof" she had that this guy was involved was the name change on the iPad. I'm not saying he didn't have it, because she obviously got it back, but if push came to shove, could he have been arrested for anything/ would the cops have bothered? I'm thinking not, but maybe I'm missing something- I'm too irritated by her casual snobbery to reread for a third time. Sure, no one has to talk nice about people who steal from them. I still don't have to enjoy her mockery of people who work at CVS and her glee at the girlfriend being fired from her barista job, even though there's no evidence at all that the girlfriend was involved.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:20 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]



In a way, people who are defending Cali Cappa and his girlfriend are the true "classists" because they believe that these two people have no chance of changing the current horrible path his life is on.

How on earth do you know that his life is on a "horrible path"? This is a serious question. Is it because he had an iPad that didn't belong to him? Because that seems a bit extreme.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:22 PM on July 28, 2013


Fuck it. I get to be rude to the asshole who took my stuff. And take yourself to hell if you think different.

No argument here. I would hope that you can be rude without being classist, racist, or sexist, or otherwise generally creepy about it.

Someone steals your stuff? They can fuck right off. But the way she chose to tell her tale has the icky feeling of the stranger in a bar who says something crappy and then give you the wink and a nudge like of course you feel exactly the way they do about "those people". She comes across like she was probably making fun of "those people" long before any of them ever did anything to deserve it.
posted by billyfleetwood at 6:26 PM on July 28, 2013 [10 favorites]


Moms that work at CVS are classless thieves that use MySpace. Probably brown, too.
posted by Brocktoon at 6:26 PM on July 28, 2013


I don't like this story so much because there is a mean-spirited attitude about, not just the thief, but about the class of people the thief knows.

If you get something really valuable stolen and you find out the identity of the guy who did it, you're probably going to be way too angry about what happened to remember to be all Class Egalitarian about things.

I had a break-in two years ago, during which someone took my laptop - and with it, everything I had ever written in ten years. There are things I've written I will never get back, things I'd been working on for years. There are photos I will never get back. There are emails I was keeping saved - the first emails I ever received from people who are precious to me, and the last emails I ever received from people who are dead. Things I will never, ever get back, all because someone thought they could break into my apartment and help myself to my things.

If I found out who took it, I doubt I would have the presence of mind to be all nice and politically correct about the things I said about him either, because I'd be too angry.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:28 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


They even pepper sprayed my dog who then jumped out my broken window, wandered downtown, looking for me.

This is horrible and heartbreaking and I hope your dog is OK and you found one another quickly.

I hope the thieves' next caper was attempting to steal live copper wire from a substation.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 6:35 PM on July 28, 2013


How on earth do you know that his life is on a "horrible path"? This is a serious question. Is it because he had an iPad that didn't belong to him? Because that seems a bit extreme.

If he accepts obviously stolen property and then acts belligerent when he is forced to give back said stolen property, then his life cannot be on a positive path.

I worked for several years with clientele similar to Cali Cappa. They feel that they deserve to just have things and that working to achieve any level of success is a sucker's game.
posted by reenum at 6:42 PM on July 28, 2013


Do people really friend random strangers with unfamiliar names in real life? Is that a thing that actual humans do?

Yes.

On that note, would you like to be friends with Fred Dyson? He's a vacuum cleaner.
posted by 23 at 6:52 PM on July 28, 2013


I'm also very curious how this story would have turned out if the thief was John Smith or had an otherwise common name.
posted by 23 at 6:53 PM on July 28, 2013


Ugh, everyone involved in this entire situation is terrible. Including everyone in this thread.
posted by elizardbits at 6:54 PM on July 28, 2013 [8 favorites]


YES EVEN ME
posted by elizardbits at 6:54 PM on July 28, 2013 [8 favorites]


This is what freaks me out with Facebook and the wealth of personal identifying information people put on it and how readily they add random people..
I know its good for this ladies case where she tracked down the person, but to have that much info within your FB account in the first place..
My FB profile is rather light on indentifying info (I'm sure someone resourceful could find more info they wanted too) but FB keeps bugging me I haven't finished my profile.
posted by Merlin The Happy Pig at 7:07 PM on July 28, 2013


I still don't have to enjoy her mockery of people who work at CVS and her glee at the girlfriend being fired from her barista job, even though there's no evidence at all that the girlfriend was involved.

At the very least, the girlfriend has an obligation to stop her boyfriend from stealing the iPad if she saw him taking it. And even if girlfriend didn't see Cali taking the iPad, she needs to have enough of a sense of right and wrong to make sure it gets back to its rightful owner.

She is by no means innocent here.
posted by reenum at 7:17 PM on July 28, 2013


Be warned that he might need to borrow some "police get out my face money" from time to time.

I thought only the rich could afford to bribe the police. Or are you talking about bail? Or are you saying that usually poor people are harassed by the police? I'm confused.


I'm quoting CaliCappa. I'm not entirely sure what it means either.
posted by ShutterBun at 7:17 PM on July 28, 2013


If you get something really valuable stolen and you find out the identity of the guy who did it, you're probably going to be way too angry about what happened to remember to be all Class Egalitarian about things.

I guess some of us don't have to remember to not be all class egalitarian about things. Speaking for myself, I don't have some deep well of intolerance that I'm being mindful to keep under wraps. I actually find classism to be disgusting.

I know from personal experience that people from all walks of life are equally shady. Rich people steal. A lot. And I'm not talking about white collar crime. I'm talking about picking up an untended ipad in a cafe and just walking off with it. Rich white folks do that shit all the time. And if you call them on it they get equally as belligerent and defensive, and it's never their fault.

I also know people who look rough and talk rough and are intelligent good hearted people. Sometimes they make the same mistakes that anyone else might. But the consequences are always higher because of where they're from, or how they look or talk. And a lot of the time their belligerence and apathy is mostly due to fear and insecurity at constantly being reminded that they're somehow "less than" because of things they really had no choice over.

I have no Idea what kind of person this alleged thief is. It's too hard to get a read on him through the cloud of class-based condescension the author inexplicably felt the need to stir up.
posted by billyfleetwood at 7:17 PM on July 28, 2013 [10 favorites]


I am asserting he is a bad person based solely on the fact that he chose to steal or accept stolen goods. It has nothing to do with his socioeconomic status. I would say the same things if Anderson Cooper or Donald Trump did something like this.
posted by reenum at 7:20 PM on July 28, 2013


I guess some of us don't have to remember to not be all class egalitarian about things. Speaking for myself, I don't have some deep well of intolerance that I'm being mindful to keep under wraps. I actually find classism to be disgusting.

that is not what I mean. What I mean is that in the white-hot moment of anger you are going to say all kinds of shit about them because you are angry and all you care about is lashing out at them, and you are going to lash out at them in every possible way. If it wasn't their spelling or grammar, you'd be lashing out at the way they dressed or smelled or something else inane.

I know from personal experience that people from all walks of life are equally shady. Rich people steal. A lot. And I'm not talking about white collar crime. I'm talking about picking up an untended ipad in a cafe and just walking off with it. Rich white folks do that shit all the time. And if you call them on it they get equally as belligerent and defensive, and it's never their fault.

Okay, if you know this from personal experience, think back to the moment that you found out this happened. Think back to that anger. Would you have been calm enough in that moment to watch what you said about the person who stole from you?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:22 PM on July 28, 2013


YES EVEN ME
posted by elizardbits


No. Not you. Never you, dear elizardbits.
posted by SPrintF at 7:26 PM on July 28, 2013


So, if the guy hadn't returned the iPad when the cops called, what could they actually do about it? If he denied it and then threw the thing in the bay, would they have been able to prosecute him for anything? I'm wondering because it seems like the only "proof" she had that this guy was involved was the name change on the iPad. I'm not saying he didn't have it, because she obviously got it back, but if push came to shove, could he have been arrested for anything/ would the cops have bothered? I'm thinking not, but maybe I'm missing something

The guy who stole my macbook when i was 18 answered this question for you. It was the most expensive thing i'd ever bought, or owned(including, even, my car. which no one would even pay $400 for). After cops, investigating whether my bandmates parents homeowners insurance would cover it(the answer amazingly was yes, but with a $2k deductible...), i just confronted the guy kinda like she did. Drove right over to his house and knocked on his door when his girlfriend wasn't home.

He denied it up and down, and later threatened me with a knife in a public park. A couple weeks after that he smashed my laptop to pieces in a "domestic disturbance" type situation.

Now that there was no evidence, there was nothing to be done. Case closed, as far as any authority figure was confirmed.

I know from personal experience that people from all walks of life are equally shady. Rich people steal. A lot. And I'm not talking about white collar crime. I'm talking about picking up an untended ipad in a cafe and just walking off with it. Rich white folks do that shit all the time. And if you call them on it they get equally as belligerent and defensive, and it's never their fault.

I'm confused as to what your point is here, honestly. There are shitty people in every walk of life, i think everyone in that thread knows this.

They're just rolling out their hobby horses because the victim is a rich white woman with a bad attitude and the thieves are a working class black lady and her boyfriend.

"Rich people can be shitty and steal things too! and poorer people can be good!" isn't much of a value add to this discussion.
posted by emptythought at 7:27 PM on July 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


I'm confused as to what your point is here, honestly. There are shitty people in every walk of life, i think everyone in that thread knows this.

I was responding to the idea that the attitude of the author was somehow justified because she was stolen from. As if the idea that being upset or in the right makes class based condescension ok.
posted by billyfleetwood at 7:36 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


We live in a class society. We are not all equal under the law in this society. There are multiple tiers of justice in this society. Your treatment in this society is based on (among other things) your income and the color of your skin, instead of things like merit and the content of your character.

This story is a microcosm for all of those things. I think they are a little more than 'hobby horses', thank you very much.
posted by KHAAAN! at 7:41 PM on July 28, 2013


What I mean is that in the white-hot moment of anger you are going to say all kinds of shit about them because you are angry and all you care about is lashing out at them, and you are going to lash out at them in every possible way. 

This isn't a white-hot moment of anger, shouted as she chases after a dude running away with her iPad. This is a several hundred word blog post, complete with edited screen shots, written weeks after the iPad was stolen and sitting on her blog for six months, with plenty of time to change or update it if she doesn't stand behind it. She owns her words as much as she owns her iPad.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 7:44 PM on July 28, 2013 [7 favorites]


If I found out who took it, I doubt I would have the presence of mind to be all nice and politically correct about the things I said about him either, because I'd be too angry.

Would you have the presence of mind to screencap everything and blog about it? We're not talking about what she said to him (which we don't know) but what she wrote about it later.

Had she said overtly racist crap in the blog post instead, I can't imagine that people would say it's completely acceptable and how could she be expected not to use racist words, she almost lost an iPad.
posted by jeather at 7:44 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


I was responding to the idea that the attitude of the author was somehow justified because she was stolen from. As if the idea that being upset or in the right makes class based condescension ok.

That's fair.

I guess what bugs me is that everyone is trying to act like these two things are traveling through the same channel and that one can cancel the other one out.

Her being upset is justified, and her working to recover her property is fine as well.

The classism and her entire attitude is disgusting. She sounds like more than one shitty rich white lady i've encountered in my life.

But there's more than a couple people in here saying that they side with the thief just because of her attitude, or that she didn't really deserve to get her shit back because the deck is stacked in the system or her attitude sucks or whatever other reason they roll out(these, by the way, are mainly what i was calling hobby horses).

I get that this stuff is a lot bigger than an iPad getting absconded from a coffee shop and some rich white lady getting pissed. But massive societal issues are being brought to bear on this one tiny situation, it's like giant opposing armies showing up to cheer on sides in an arm wrestling match.

As i said before, this whole thing is getting really heavily freighted. And i think people are duct taping a lot of their own issues and experiences onto this even when the scope of them is pretty far outside of this.

The main thing that weird me out is that people are simultaneously going "Oh man look at this shitty rich chicks crap attitude looking down her nose fuck her i'm not siding with that" BUT ALSO at the same time "Who cares? it's an ipad, she obviously didn't care just write it off" which as atrazine says is total privilege blaster shit.

I mean i knew this site was mostly like middle class + liberals who want to get cool points for siding with the poor black dude being oppressed by some rich white lady, but that view of theft kinda betrays a hell of a lot of you there.

Maybe it didn't matter to her, but the woman who took it from her work had no way of knowing that it wasn't just some poor college students only portable system to do their schoolwork on or something. As has been said, ipads are no longer a rich person toy. This was a pretty indiscriminate theft if she just left it in the shop and it was found later.

Kinda starting to agree with elizardbits here, honestly.
posted by emptythought at 8:01 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


"In a followup move to the wildly successful stand your ground bill, Florida legislators have announced a bold new 'give me back my shit' law...we have Al Sharpton and Joe Arpaio here on out panel..."
posted by lordaych at 8:03 PM on July 28, 2013


"Theft is just something that happens to people who have things worth stealing" is one of the lines I edited out when I tried to fix the wording of my comment, sigh.

I see you basically retracted this comment but even so, let me tell you my story! (Please.) In the mid-1990s, I owned a 15+-year-old Datsun hatchback. I loved it but it was a disaster. There was moss growing on the outside and at least two kinds of fungus on the inside, I had to use a stick to prop the hatch open, and every one of its systems had major problems. (I fixed the brakes but couldn't afford to do much else.) But it ran, for me, at least most of the time, and I couldn't afford anything I could guarantee would run any better.

One Sunday afternoon a friend of mine and I went to the movies down at the mall. When we returned, we found that someone had attempted to hotwire my car. My scabrous car, in the middle of a sea of nicer vehicles. The reason they'd failed was they didn't know it wasn't enough to switch on the ignition. The alternator was unreliable, so you had to turn off the radio and lights and heater before you started the car, you needed to double or triple-clutch to start, and it would stall if you tried to back it up without giving it full gas.

My car thief failed to steal my terrible car because it was so terrible it wouldn't actually run for anyone but me.

Lessons learned: No matter how obviously terrible your shit is, someone might try to take it. A thief's motives are beyond your ken.
posted by gingerest at 8:13 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


I teach at a title I school where most of our students are inner city. A year and half ago, my credit card was stolen from my desk by a student while I was teaching class. They ended up spending over a thousand dollars before my bank called me about suspicious activity (in just about three hours). The places they went were Pac-Sun, Gamestop, dinning out, a head shop (over $300 . . . who spends that amount at a headshop?). Though I reported it and my credit union eventually reimbursed me, they never caught the student.

This kid wasn't buying food or paying rent. This kid stole from me so he could buy stuff he wanted knowing exactly who he stole from. I guess the whole point is that people who steal things aren't exactly fighting the man or speaking truth to power. They're taking, without permission, from you or me or people that know them. Not every person who steals is a horrible human being, but stealing is pretty damn bad, and people don't know if that thousand dollars they stole from you was your rent. They just don't care.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 8:18 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


ALVY'S FATHER
You fired the cleaning woman?

ALVY'S MOTHER
She was stealing.

ALVY'S FATHER
But she's colored.

ALVY'S MOTHER
SO?

ALVY'S FATHER
So the colored have enough trouble.

ALVY'S MOTHER
She was going through my pocketbook!

ALVY'S FATHER
They're persecuted enough!

ALVY'S MOTHER
Who's persecuting? She stole!

Alvy's father gets up and gets his hard hat. He sits back down and starts
polishing it.

ALVY'S FATHER
All right-so we can afford it.

ALVY'S MOTHER
How can we afford it? On your pay?
What if she steals more?

ALVY'S FATHER
She's a colored woman, from Harlem!
She has no money! She's got a right
to steal from us! After all, who is
she gonna steal from if not us?

ADULT ALVY
(Yelling into the scene)
You're both crazy!
posted by ShutterBun at 8:27 PM on July 28, 2013 [5 favorites]


This isn't a white-hot moment of anger, shouted as she chases after a dude running away with her iPad. This is a several hundred word blog post, complete with edited screen shots, written weeks after the iPad was stolen and sitting on her blog for six months, with plenty of time to change or update it if she doesn't stand behind it. She owns her words as much as she owns her iPad.

And that's how mad she still is.

But by all means, excuse what the guy did because she was mean in her reaction to him. Let's see what happens when someone steals something of yours and see how charitable you are to the culprit.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:31 PM on July 28, 2013


But by all means, excuse what the guy did because she was mean in her reaction to him. Let's see what happens when someone steals something of yours and see how charitable you are to the culprit.

One can call a victim out for acting like an asshole and still blame the perpetrator for their theft.

About a decade ago, I was in China and there was a large group of people that encircled the thief and who I presume the person he stole from. The victim started getting pushy and hostile, as were some of the people surrounding him. The thief was probably guilty as he was cowering away, but it felt kind of pit-in-my-stomach wrong the way he was being treated and the possibility he was going to get beaten. But, I didn't know what to do and tried to tell everyone to calm down, but couldn't get close enough (the crowd was fairly big when I came along). I tried to find a police officer, but had to give up because I lost my nerve and really did not know what to do.

And, when you say, "let's see how charitable you are to the culprit" is similar to the argument posed by people who support the death penalty, to use a more extreme example.
posted by FJT at 8:48 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


Ya know, she's not exactly calling for the guy to have his hand chopped off. He wasn't even charged. The author is entitled to a little bit of a smug victory lap, as far as I'm concerned. She was able to catch and shame a property thief, and property thieves of this variety are a big(ish) part of "why so much stuff sucks," in my opinion.
posted by ShutterBun at 9:01 PM on July 28, 2013


The privilege being flashed in this thread is astounding—the privilege of sheltered people who have never been stolen from. Let they who support this injustice-correcting thief post their tax returns so I can know if it's OK for me to steal their bourgeois computers which they use to cross to this side of the digital divide!
posted by ignignokt at 10:05 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


He wasn't even charged. The author is entitled to a little bit of a smug victory lap, as far as I'm concerned.

Back to my original point: The author isn't wrong here, they're just an asshole.
posted by FJT at 10:26 PM on July 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


I had my iPhone ripped out of my hands when the train stopped. The dude just grabbed it and ran out the door. He wasn't expecting me to keep holding onto it (via the rubber case) as I chased him out the door and onto the platform while screaming "fuck you, asshole! That's my fucking phone!" He wasn't expecting me to be on the phone with police dispatch within seconds of him escaping (with my phone) across incoming traffic and narrowly missed getting hit by oncoming traffic due to a helpful passenger. He wasn't expecting me to use Find my iPhone to pinpoint exactly where he was. This was way back when that service just became available. He wasn't expecting to be arrested within hours of deciding to steal my phone. I saw him in court a month afterwards. I was still so angry at him, I could barely be civil. He apologized and said he knew how I felt because while he was in jail, his stuff got stolen, too. To this day, I regret not being capable of a more empathetic response than "yeah, it sucks." I did do my best to convince the prosecuting attorney to not send him to prison, that a $700 iPhone was not worth destroying this kid's life over. The thing that sucks most about theft is everything else it takes away from you in addition to your stuff. It takes away your sense of trust. It makes you suspicious and paranoid. It voids the social contract and leaves you feeling weirdly in limbo. I hate thieves. If its not yours, if you didn't pay for it, then don't take it.
posted by awesomelyglorious at 10:30 PM on July 28, 2013 [12 favorites]


The problem isn't how smug she is about whomever stole her ipad. (or found and didn't return, it's not actually clear, I know that's stealing, but it's also more understandable. Finding things is a lot easier for people to convince themselves is victimless.) The problem is how smug she is about his friends and how many signifiers for "not middle class and therefore trashy" she has.

She talks about how "unsophisticated" he and his friends are several times, oh my god she needed to troll MYSPACE of all places to find pictures that were at his level. And look, a single mother. Who went to Redwood High! (For those who don't know, Redwood city is one of those poorer cities surrounded by super rich towns. Although it's changing a hell of a lot these days because everything has gotten so expensive, still, there's some serious "this is where Those People are from" going on. Which is doubly sad as I doubt she grew up in the Bay Area and I strongly suspect she doesn't actually know anyone who grew up in Redwood City, but she's totally internalized the snobbery.) There there's the "can you believe how these people write" crap she pulls, which as other people mentioned is hilarious because when she actually is chatting with the dude she's got her cringeworthy slang going on. But at least she's "sophisticated."

She got her ipad back with some detective work and that's cool. Stories like that generally go over pretty well here. But the way she wrote this piece shows some real uglyness in how thinks and how she sees people she thinks are beneath her. Not just the guy who has her stolen ipad, but how she feels about people who aren't middle class enough for her. And that uglyness is what people are reacting to.

And you know, the Bay Area has a real clash of cultures right now. There's a lot wealth that's pushing against areas that traditionally don't have much. In the long run that tends to help communities, but it's pretty damn obvious that it's going to cause short term problems and resentments. That's why gentrification tends to annoy people, especially younger people who grew up and are watching their hometowns change, while at the same time knowing that plenty of people look down on them because they aren't "sophisticated" enough.
posted by aspo at 10:39 PM on July 28, 2013 [11 favorites]


And I forgot to add. This is HER story. This is her chance to write up something to make herself look awesome and great. It's not like other people are taking something she said, especially something she said in the heat of the moment, out of context. No. This is her article directly, and she so oblivious she doesn't even know how ugly she sounds.
posted by aspo at 10:47 PM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Sure, she's privileged. She also had her stuff stolen, but got it back, when we're told time and time again that there's little-to-no chance of stolen goods ever being recovered. More power to her.

As per usual, someone had to claim it was all faked, though I'm glad that didn't really take hold as an idea. Unfortunately, I can't remember who it was who said that every time a woman posts a story online there will be comments saying that they just did it for attention, but it's certainly holding true.
posted by gadge emeritus at 11:17 PM on July 28, 2013


every time a woman posts a story online there will be comments saying that they just did it for attention, but it's certainly holding true

Yup. I just carefully re-read the original piece, and there's far more sexism and judginess in this thread than there is in that.

And you know, I walk this line every day. In fact, within the last day I was called racial slurs for asking some women to be quiet walking down the street at midnight. I question, much of the time, whether I should be making this or that 911 (or non-emergency dispatch as may be) call based on things like "are these guys really fighting, or is it just that they come from a particular machismo culture where they need to shove each other around occasionally to maintain mutual respect, and if so, am I exhibiting privilege by expecting quiet on my street, and if so, am I maintaining the prison industrial complex by initiating these young men into the criminal justice system where, as adults or near-adults, they will maintain a lifetime arrest record?" Or maybe I try not to think about that and just try to decide whether the decibel level is something I can live with. I honestly don't know whether I'm satirizing this thread or not when I say all of that. But I can say that this thread almost reeks of distance from the real world.
posted by dhartung at 11:39 PM on July 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


But by all means, excuse what the guy did because she was mean in her reaction to him. Let's see what happens when someone steals something of yours and see how charitable you are to the culprit.

First of all, who is excusing the guy? I called it "theft" and most of the others on here who got your back up have said similar. But just as being poor doesn't excuse you from theft, being stolen from doesn't excuse you from - especially at a remove from the crime - writing a vulgar exercise in virtual poverty tourism and cryptoracism.

If you'd like to see what happens when I get something stolen, you're in luck. Turns out I wrote a blog post the day I was pickpocketed[1][2] in Dubai, losing roughly an iPad worth of cash as well as all of my credit and bank cards, so I couldn't get any more money. Unlike Gayle, I never got one fucking dirham back, and she probably didn't have to sleep in a bedbug infested room while waiting for her property. She was also not stranded two miles from her hotel with less than a dollar in cash.

As I said, I wrote a blog post that day, and I managed to not say a bunch of gross shit about the thief; about the worst I can say is that I wasn't as embarrassed as I should have been about how long the bus I was on was delayed by the cops. I'm a bit of a privacy nut and I'd rather not publically link my MeFi and my travel blog personas, but please MeMail me if you want to read it and hold me accountable.

[1] If we're still scoring by how personal the crime is, a hand in my pocket has to count for something.
[2]Autocorrect suggested "pickpocket educated", which is ironically accurate.

posted by Homeboy Trouble at 11:56 PM on July 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


She was able to catch and shame a property thief,

She didn't shame him, and that's actually one thing I think she did well - she used a pseudonym for him and blurred out the details. Because putting his real information out there could have opened him up to the Internet Hate Machine, and the full shitcockery that the IHM puts out at max pressure is pretty much only justifiable for war crimes.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 12:18 AM on July 29, 2013 [5 favorites]


Actually, the firehose of the IHM might have been good for them. When the cops come after you, you can argue that it's a corrupt system or whatever. When everyone turns hostile to you, there's really no other conclusion to come to than maybe you shouldn't have done that thing.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:32 AM on July 29, 2013


Lessons learned: No matter how obviously terrible your shit is, someone might try to take it. A thief's motives are beyond your ken.

Hah, yea i've had two shitmobile cars in my life. The first one was very similar to your datsun, and the second one i still have(it's actually kind of cool looking, but it's definitely that type of "everything is a little bit off" buttmobile).

Someone has tried to steal both cars. The passenger door lock is broken from someone trying to jimmy it, and the drivers one you have to wiggle in just the right way. To this day i just don't get it, from even 50 feet away it looks like it probably wouldn't even run if you tried to steal it and yet people have. The thing just looks like a probable cause mobile, it's gotten followed by the cops a multitude of times just for existing on the road driving legally in every way. And yet, thieves.

But I can say that this thread almost reeks of distance from the real world.

The more time goes by, and the more time it gets to marinate in my brain the more it really seems that way.

Many people here are harping on the distance between the two(or three) major players in this story, but the difference most posters here have is also huge. I've expounded on this, but yea. Flashing beacons of privilege like ignignokt mentioned. I actually love this thread because it's shown me that mefi is actually a bit depressing in this regard. I basically gave up on reddit a long while ago because of other kinds of privilege and shittiness being paraded around and used as clubs there, but i guess no matter how far or fast you run you can't escape classism. Even within a group of people attacking someone else for classism.

This kid wasn't buying food or paying rent. This kid stole from me so he could buy stuff he wanted knowing exactly who he stole from. I guess the whole point is that people who steal things aren't exactly fighting the man or speaking truth to power. They're taking, without permission, from you or me or people that know them. Not every person who steals is a horrible human being, but stealing is pretty damn bad, and people don't know if that thousand dollars they stole from you was your rent. They just don't care.

You know, and this is something that bugs me. I've never been a rich or even like "solidly/upper middle class" person. I pretty much went from that bottom end of middle class throughout my early-mid childhood. I briefly went to a private elementary school, but then it jumped to where it's like "your dad loses his job and you're on foodstamps and then evicted" and then to couch surfing and living on my own in highschool, and working shitty service jobs until i reach-arounded my way in to an entry level tech job. I still pretty much live paycheck to paycheck and "get it done" when it comes to living my life.

I've lived in basically every shitty area my town has to offer. Like directly across the street from motels full of sex workers type of stuff. For example, my highschool family home at one point had an undercover cop shot a few feet from our front steps. A rental house i lived in a few years ago with a bunch of people was literally across the street from a jail. No neighbors across the way, jail.

The reason i'm setting this up is that i've seen a lot of theft, and a lot of really sketchy shit. People have been chased through my yard by the cops at gunpoint, groups of people have tried to kick my door in because "I KNOW THAT HOES IN THERE". Thinking back on it, i've lived in exactly one place that wasn't robbed in some way at some point. And i think it actually was, and i was just too young to remember it.

I have never, ever seen any theft that isn't of this "makes the world shittier" variety. I have yet to see the like, understandable "well they're just getting fucked by the system and trying to get by maaaan" shit that people in this thread seem to be imagining. The "equalizing" theft. That kind of shit happens, but not in an interpersonal way. That shit is people shoplifting food from grocery stores and walmart and target and shit. And even then you could launch a good discussion about people stealing luxury items. Which could get VERY ugly in the whole "lol poor people aren't allowed to have nice things" sense, but really, if you're going to launch in to some kind of "justifiable or at least understandable" theft thing, or go "look i know he was wrong but bla bla bla fart fart" then at least acknowledge that this was a luxury item and he wasn't just flipping it to get some subsistence money.

No, this kind of person-to-person theft is never a subsistence thing unless they're fueling a drug habit. It's only ever really the theft of status items. I've had my house robbed and had actual cash left lying there along with a lot of "why the fuck didn't they steal this" shit that was laying right next to say, a semi-decent camera and some lenses or a friends laptop i was fixing which got stolen.

If i wrote out a list of everything that's ever been stolen from me, or taken when my house was robbed, or lifted from parties, or stolen from a parked car, or whatever... it's NEVER staying alive stuff or even for the most part really "quick money" stuff. It's things people would want to own.

And every time i've tracked down a thief they've just been using whatever they took from me.

However gross this woman's opinions and presentation therein are, what she encountered is also something pretty fucking gross i've seen before. At least a little bit of her shitty attitude is kind of justifiable here, because they took something thinking they could get away with it and enjoy it for nothing and then got all asshurt when someone told them they didn't get to do so.

Some people really do want something for nothing and get all indignant when you call them on it. And fuck them.

She didn't shame him, and that's actually one thing I think she did well - she used a pseudonym for him and blurred out the details. Because putting his real information out there could have opened him up to the Internet Hate Machine, and the full shitcockery that the IHM puts out at max pressure is pretty much only justifiable for war crimes.

You know, i didn't even think about this because such an explosion happened nearly instantly when this got posted... But you're right.

This is actually a fairly unusual, and non-douchey thing within a fairly douche-o-matic post. People usually seem to be super eager to turn that firehose on anyone they're annoyed with if they think they even have a slight chance of having a big enough wrench, so to speak, to turn the hydrant on.

What he and his girlfriend did was low level shitty, and i think getting hauled in by the cops and her getting fired was about exactly on par for what should have happened. Anything else would have been pretty punitive and tiresome IMO.

If someone stole my shit and this was the outcome i'd be happy. I'd have avoided the bad-look blog post, but the fact that there was a record in some police database that they were at least thrown in a cruiser and brought in for this would make me feel pretty nice. If they decided to try and keep someone elses shit and got snagged it would show up that this wasn't the first time they'd had that idea.

And yea, what a lot of people in this thread seem to be missing is that this was a completely opportunistic "because i can" theft of a luxury item they weren't even trying to sell. If they get busted doing this again, then honestly fuck them. The criminal justice system may be fucked up as hell and biased, but the power of that fully operational battlestation was intended for people like this who actually want something for nothing and aren't just "trying to get by man".

And this is of course ignoring the fact that although she was fired, being a barista is not a fucking hand to mouth job. I did it at a shitty shop, and i see what people make at the nicer shop i work on the back end of now. With tips at a popular place(and the place she described isn't a starbucks, it's a "cool local place" type shop) you can cruise past 30k easy. Like $12+ an hour plus $80 a day or more in tips. And if they're living together possibly and he's working there is no hand to mouth going on here. Even if she has her own place many people are living on less than that and doing pretty comfortable up where i am, which is likely even more expensive than wherever they were commuting in to in that part of california.

This is not some fucking "rich white woman crushes hand to mouth black guy with the evil racist system" thing. It's opportunistic thieves who could have more than likely bought their own ipad on craigslist getting told because they thought they could get something for nothing.

Actually, the firehose of the IHM might have been good for them. When the cops come after you, you can argue that it's a corrupt system or whatever. When everyone turns hostile to you, there's really no other conclusion to come to than maybe you shouldn't have done that thing.

Honestly, and it took me a long time to come around to this, the IHM is never a good thing. I've yet to see a totally justifiable badass instance of it that wasn't some pre-organized loosely affiliated with 4chan-anon thing like #oprollredroll. When the IHM gets spun up for something like this it's almost always with only one side of the story, like half the info, etc. Hell in the related posts you can see this which at first and even second glance seems like the IHM coming out to really land a solid punch where it's deserved, but as you get in to it the story gets pretty fucking sad and it becomes really murky what's actually going on to the point that it seems like no one really knows. Someone is just getting burned to the ground by the IHM because a TL;DR of the facts makes them seem like satans right hand man.

This is all i've seen every fucking time. And i've been internetting since i was six years old and installing windows 95 from floppies. There's people on here who've been on way longer and have probably seen even more IHM action in usenet/newsgroups. I've watched it happen since the very early days of messageboards and when metafilter was literally in its infancy.

It's to the point now that i'm so skeptical of IHM city-sacking raids that i often think if all i ever hear is an unimpeachable story of a puppy kicking child molester, then i simply never heard the whole story. It just seems too damn easy to construct a story in such a way that any response the person has including not responding just makes them look worse. If even one or two details from the fucked up inflammatory story are true then the accused is still guilty.

And i've been on both sides of this too. Riding high into battle against someone i had absolute contempt for with the IHM power right behind me, and getting doxed and fucked with and endlessly harassed for absolutely BS reasons.

The only time the IHM is ever good is with the kind of stuff i mentioned above. Where it's like "here's a massive amount of insider info with cites/screenshots/etc, or here's a lot of externally verifiable info about this plus some data to connect it together. You make your own decision, read the whole story". Not just "this person sucks and did this one thing fuck them!". Interpersonal based IHM shit needs to die, large scale stuff that's in the media where it's the only way to really get true action is one of the few times the human flesh search engine IHM stuff can be sorta, grey area ok.

So no, this guy did not deserve the IHM. And neither does likely anyone on this site or most others ever. Fuck that shit.
posted by emptythought at 3:24 AM on July 29, 2013 [10 favorites]


Apropos of Something: Meeting an asshole is not justification for being an asshole.

So "being kind of a jerk on a blog" equals "stealing personal property"?
posted by spaltavian at 6:14 AM on July 29, 2013


If condescension is such a crime -- and I'm not talking about "rude to your waiter" condescension, I'm talking about "judging from his Facebook page, I don't think this guy with my stolen iPad is the sharpest tool in the shed" condescension -- then where the fuck do people get off calling this woman an asshole based on her blog post? "OMG someone isn't being 100% charitable on the internet, nothing causes me greater pain, time to log in and call her a smug asshole. I mean, what really kills me is the lack of self-awareness. The agony!"
posted by leopard at 6:59 AM on July 29, 2013 [6 favorites]


painquaile: pics or it didn't happen!

I've had a lot of people tell me I should make a Tumblr, but I already feel uncomfortably voyeuristic by secretly looking at someone else's photos. They're not really something I want to put out there in public.
posted by painquale at 10:13 AM on July 29, 2013


I mean, what really kills me is the lack of self-awareness. The agony!"

I think the main difference here is she has the power. She has 1.8k votes for her post. Me calling her an asshole is punching up. Her blogging about the thief is punching down.
posted by FJT at 9:36 PM on July 29, 2013


She said herself she could sic the IHM on the thief.
posted by FJT at 9:45 PM on July 29, 2013


This "punching up" vs "punching down" line that keeps getting trotted out on Metafilter has been stretched well past it's usefulness. Dude stole her iPad. She didn't oppress a minority or other a marginalized group; she mocked someone that did direct harm to her. She didn't punch down, she punched back.
posted by spaltavian at 5:40 AM on July 30, 2013 [4 favorites]


I think the main difference here is she has the power. She has 1.8k votes for her post. Me calling her an asshole is punching up. Her blogging about the thief is punching down.

Some recommended reading.
posted by leopard at 8:18 AM on July 30, 2013


This "punching up" vs "punching down" line that keeps getting trotted out on Metafilter has been stretched well past it's usefulness.

People always change their tune about that when they become the punchee.
posted by sidereal at 1:21 PM on July 30, 2013


This "punching up" vs "punching down" line that keeps getting trotted out on Metafilter has been stretched well past it's usefulness. Dude stole her iPad. She didn't oppress a minority or other a marginalized group; she mocked someone that did direct harm to her. She didn't punch down, she punched back.

As much as i agree that line is overused, i'm gonna have to say this isn't totally true.

What she did is in the same kind of quadrant(and as some people said above about crypto/dogwhistle racism, almost is) as if she had made weird comments about "those people"... which honestly, she... basically did.

She isn't just punching back, she's making a lot of weird shitty classist comments about "lol single mothers who work at cvs" and the way he talks and other stuff that are pretty much just cruft.

There's punching back going on here, but she used it as an excuse and free pass to get worked up and punch down. There is a definite tone to her post of "those people are exactly the way you were told they are and that your biases make you think they are. Keep thinking that, it's true! they're dangerous they steal your things, see! these ones even fit all the stereotypes!"

None of that was really needed.

I defended her right to recover her property, and even defended her in some other ways(just because you're wealthy doesn't mean your shit isn't yours), but i'm not going to fucking defend that.

All i wish is that people could separate her shitty words from her fairly just action of recovering her property. They two related, but separate sets of actions that could have easily happened without eachother.(and i bet among the right friends she has a lot of words to say about those people).
posted by emptythought at 2:04 PM on July 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


Eh, was she inaccurate in describing a "typical" Facebook friend profile for Cali Cuppa? Which is the extent of her crime here. The outrage over an upper class person betraying an awareness of class differences along with a touch of snobbishness seems a bit precious -- what difference does it make? The mind-reading, the sureness about how she generally talks and thinks, is interesting -- I guess you can draw vast conclusions about "those people" after all.
posted by leopard at 3:05 PM on July 30, 2013 [3 favorites]


I can see why people might complain about classism, as she seems to get in a few jabs at people she regards as both her intellectual and economic inferiors. I have less of a problem with the former than the latter, but neither is great.

I think calling it racism is mind-reading, though, and part of the general lack of charity people are giving her. She might be a graceless winner, sure, but that doesn't mean she's everything else you ascribe to her.
posted by gadge emeritus at 8:17 PM on July 30, 2013


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