This morning we awoke to discover that someone had taken it upon themselves to remove from us the burden of having a custom car stereo. Sounds pretty bad, huh? No one likes to have a criminal lurking about their neighborhood. Someone once stole a car stereo from my parents garage when my little sister was playing in the backyard.
There are, however, mitigating circumstances that make this situation actually pretty funny, and in a strange way ... nice. First of all, (he he) though the stereo still looked nice, in reality it was almost ten years old. In fact, it was on the brink of breaking anyway: the buttons were getting squishy and it had stopped playing some CDs. This means it won't work for him for long and he probably won't get more than $10-15 off it.
In the end, it's really more of a convenience for us, as I've wanted to dump it for some time, but haven't really had the heart to go spend the money on a new one. Now I have to go get a 21st-century stereo.
Secondly, there didn't appear to be a lot of sophistication to the whole attack because doofus left everything of much higher value in the car. Yep, he didn't notice the remote wire in the back of the stereo that went to the $200 subwoofer. Apparently the idiot doesn't have the brain-power to identify a GPS module because he left that on the passenger seat too.
But best of all, when I got to the car this morning, I noticed a shiny blue object sitting on the passenger seat as well. That's right, tweedle-dumb left his flashlight (with fingerprints clearly visible on the cold metal) at the scene of the crime. So now you're on record as a car stereo theif champ. The smile it gave me and the police officer that came to get it makes the whole thing worth losing an old stereo. :)
In the end, the whole ordeal actually ended up as sort of a nice experience because it allowed Jon and I to have our first real father-son work project together: putting the stock stereo in the car for temporary use.