I have rarely had anything stolen from me. One time Falkoff and I were mugged in Amsterdam. We were probably very easy to mug after having gone to an outdoor ATM while walking lost in the spider-web of streets and canals in an altered state of mind. My green Schwinn Mirada mountain bike was stolen out of the basement boiler room of 155 Bay State Road while I was in college. Recently a thief took some shelves that had been delivered by Pottery Barn to our doorstep before we had a chance to drag them up the stairs. I also cried one time when my apple was taken from me and then the neighbors kids played keep away with it until I was sufficiently upset and then exploded it by throwing it into a tree.

Yesterday morning I went down to the basement of 50 St. Paul Street to hop on my bike to go to the gym. I have two bikes that are both similar in the basement because they were bought as a pair including a lady’s bike and a men’s bike. The Lady’s bike is in disrepair due to lack of use and an unfortunate incident with a car including deflated tires, a cracked gear shifter, and a bent brake controller. Since it is dark in the basement and the two bikes look similar I hopped on the ladies bike and walked three feet to discover that not only was I on the wrong bike but that the bike that I intended to ride was mysteriously missing and most likely stolen.

The basement is a common area and I have had a bike stolen out of the common area before so the first thing that comes to my mind when my bicycle is stolen in the basement is here we go again. The dejected and miserable feeling that you get when someone steals your bike that you left unlocked in a basement next to a boiler is not a good one. The first time that it happened to me I was furious with the perpetrator and vowed to invent a new line of evil bicycle seats that would punish anyone stealing a bike or purchasing a stolen bike. Once activated, when the thief sat on the bike the bike would release a pin filled with a drug that would knock them unconscious for 48 hours and give them a really bad hangover. The brakes could be deactivated at high speeds to cause the thief to be unable to stop the bike when riding down a fast hill. So in short I was pissed the first time.

The dejected feeling when you have already had the same problem once before is one of shame and self-pity. So I was standing in the basement looking around at the other bikes on display with my blue helmet in hand thinking about how I was going to have to drive the five blocks to the gym from my new parking space.

My new parking space is great actually. I just started parking there as of Saturday night. The last space that I had that was a twelve minute walk required five street crossings and the space itself included an odd dance where the owner would park my car and two others into the space after midnight and move his old Volvo at six AM. If I got back too late then there would be no place to put the car. The driveway itself is a steep hill that is covered with branches that tend to leave key mark style scratches down the back of the PT Cruiser in the spring and a treacherous ice highway with snow banks on either side during the winter. The distance to the space had gotten so great that I had started to bike to it every morning when I went to move the car and then biked back every night when I parked.

The new space I got through the people who rent me the space that Sarah’s car is in. Sarah’s space is also a Brookline special with a big hill at the bottom and people who park their cars at all angles making it difficult to maneuver in and out of the space. The owners had friends moving into the big new condo complex that used to be Richie from the old parking lot’s families place and their friends didn’t have a car and didn’t know who to rent a space to. So Sarah and I lucked out with this new swank space behind the new swank condo complex.

So the first night that I was able to move the car into the new space was May 1st. That was Saturday night. Sarah and I had been stir crazy enough to go out to see a real movie and given that I love Douglas Adams books and the old BBC television series we went to watch the new adaptation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. My personal opinion of the movie was that it was a mediocre rendition of the wit from Douglas Adams. It was like watching Catch-22 the movie. I know the story well enough to know that they inserted a love triangle that didn’t fit to make it more of a movie plot and that was more annoying than entertaining.

What we learned about going out that we already knew before is that it is much more expensive and complex to go out than it is to stay in. Going out with a car requires you to park somewhere and parking near the Boston Commons to go to the Lowes Theatre is difficult. After scanning for parking and getting caught in a disaster of traffic behind the theatre near where they are showing Phantom of the Opera, we finally doubled back to cache our car under the Commons in the lot. That lot was great because they only charged $10 and everyone else wanted $20 but it has the problem that after midnight all of the entry pods shut down except for a couple and they all look the same so you are playing a game of concentration to see which one you have tried to enter while running around the commons hoping that you don’t get mugged in the dark while you are looking for them by the people who the entry pods are supposed to lock out. Saturday night was a rainy night so that made the game even more fun.

So when we had completed watching the movie and gone through the pod game it was already past midnight which meant that I couldn’t park the car at the old space. This was mainly because it was past midnight and there would be a Volvo blocking the driveway not because I had successfully cancelled the parking for May. But the price for May will only be $90 because of the $30 parking ticket I incurred one night because I couldn’t get into the space at 11:30 pm and nobody had responded when I called and knocked to ask them to move the Volvo.

I used to have a 1987 Volvo 740 Turbo Intercooler station wagon that I would park at the bottom of a long driveway at 930 Mass Ave in the mid to late nineties. The turbo had long since stopped working and the air conditioner also didn’t operate at the time At one point during a snow storm I almost backed the car over myself while I was trapped with my leg stuck under the chain fence at the bottom of the hill after I tried to push it from behind with the engine running and the car in drive. But at least the commute to the space at 930 Mass Ave. The Volvo, which was about as much of a prize as my old mountain bike was kind of stolen once. It happened one night when I was working during an all-nighter on a prototype demo for Shiva, who became our second real ChannelWave client and eventually became Intel as a client after an acquisition. I had decided that in order to finish the demo I was going to need either sleep or coffee. I opted for coffee so I went down the street two blocks to the local 7/11 and bought a nice big hot coffee. I then walked back on Mass Ave., passing a few dangerous looking night folks and became alert as the caffeine in the coffee kicked-in. I then proceeded to knock out a pretty good demo.

The next morning I was a bit groggy but in the afternoon I had to drive out to 3Com for a meeting because they were our first ChannelWave customer. When I went down the driveway I noticed that my 740 Turbo Intercooler Volvo station wagon was missing and had most likely been stolen. So I told everyone in the building that my car had been stolen and they all recommended that I go immediately to the police station. I decided that was the right recourse since it might be recoverable. I didn’t have a lo-jack on the old beast and it might be recoverable because someone had taken a slow joy ride in it or tried to pull parts from it. So I walked towards the police station.

The police station in Cambridge is in Central square and 930 Mass Ave is halfway between Harvard and Central. The walk to the police station includes a walk past the 7/11. So while I was sleep deprived and gurgling with angry thoughts of the vengeance I would take on the Volvo thieves I passed by the post office and directly in front of 7/11 my Volvo was parked with about four parking tickets from throughout the day. So apparently I had driven to the 7/11 because I was so tired and then walked back once I had some coffee in me.

So when I was pacing and fuming in the basement yesterday morning I realized that the thing that had happened to me twice was not that my bicycle had been stolen but instead that I had once again put my mode of transportation in one location and not returned on it. In the switch-over from one parking space to the other on Saturday night I had biked over to the crazy parked-in parking space then spent my day with Sarah (actually I had golfed with Falkoff in the rain from 9AM to 3PM and then spent the rest of the day with Sarah). I had parked in the spiffy and swank new lot and left the bike far away.

So I left the basement with a glimmer of hope in my eye that the bicycle wasn’t stolen and walked the twelve minutes to the parking space. I breathed a deep sigh of relief as I unlocked the bike from the bush branches it was connected to in the yard near the parking space. I then biked to the gym and proceeded to elliptically run in place for 40 minutes before pushing some weights and then biking home again.