Theft Fantasies!

Got to tell you, yesterday at Immigration, during the thousand year wait to be interviewed for new visas, by chance I was sitting next to the sweetest young British guy and we got talking.

Turns out he's a fellow theft victim: one of us! His story goes that he's currently traveling around the world on his gap-year backpacking journey (I'm meeting lots of these folk these days, aren't I!) when he was robbed in Hong Kong; lost his entire backpack including all his tickets and money, credit cards and, yes, his passport.

And yes, he thought it was stolen by an Arab-looking guy ... which makes it three people including me who thinks they were robbed by Arabs/Pakistanis (and remember how the Redoubtable Walkers foiled an attempted robbery of Mrs Walker's purse by a young Pakistani-looking guy so let's make that FOUR) ... so, since I can't possibly be meeting ALL of the folk robbed by Islamic-types, there's obviously something afoot in Arab world that needs to be looked into BIGTIME!

Anyway, young British guy - I never got his name - said he'd known nothing but kindness from everyone since the robbery, so his experience wasn't anything like my awful one up in China, and that he'd been taken in by a kindly family who were paying for everything so it hadn't cost him much at all (Keith says this entire robbery-thing has cost us nearly HK$30,000 so far and that doesn't include the stuff that was actually stolen!)

But that isn't the part I wanted to talk about. What was really, really interesting was that we had so much in common in the "theft fantasy" department: we both had been doing lots of "god bothering" to get our belongings back, we both hate the idea of people tossing aside our special items as "valueless", AND we both shared this stupid idea that one day in the near future we'd be standing in line someplace and the person in front would give their name and it would be OURS! Yup, that we'd stand right behind our Identity Thief!

We then talked long and hard about what we'd do next.

And that's when we got very silly with it: both picking really ugly people around the room and going "That's you!" and ending up with the giggles. I know, I know, I'm far too old for this sort of childishness but it's the type of thing that happens when you have to wait a thousand years for an interview.


Actually, regarding standing in line behind someone who turns out to have your exact name has happened to Keith, although the context was different. Yup, when we lived in Townsville, Keith was standing in line for a renewal of his driver's license, when he heard the person in front of him give his name and it was all Keith's. Naturally Keith got all excited and, the minute the other guy was free, introduced himself ... only to have this barrage of hostility directed at him! Turns out the other K.W.R. had his wallet stolen a few years earlier and thought Keith was the identity thief ... and the sad part was that he wasn't interested in establishing the truth; just said lots of rude and threatening things and stormed off.

When Keith got home and told me about it, we both decided it was too mysterious to be ignored, so pulled out his family tree (thank you Helen for all the work you put into getting it together) and it turns out that a branch of Keith's family - a couple of his great great grandfather's children - had moved to the same town the OTHER K.W.R. had given as his address.

Ever since he'd seen his family tree, and realising there was an Australian branch of cousins who lived only several towns down the coast, he'd talked about getting in touch with them ... but after all that nastiness we decided if this ghastly OTHER K.W.R. guy was anything to go by that we really hadn't the least desire to meet them! Like, not EVER!