And how they’ve unfolded! If you listen to the Edge you would have heard me at about 5:20pm get hassled about living in Greymouth, among other things. Anyhow, if you missed it, you can download it here. I’d also just like to stress that it was James Nimmo who uploaded the video with the sound track to Google Video. I originally only uploaded it to this website, and passed it around, which is where James Nimmo found it. Cheers again for that James, cool name too.

Sherlock Homes FTW

Wow, is all I can say… I’ve had half a dozen emails from people wanting to buy the footage, 50 odd from people wanting to put banners on this website, several hundred from people saying “I hope you get the guy!” and 1 from someone saying “It’s your own fault it got stolen” – I guess you can’t win them all.

Today I was front page in our local paper, dressed like Sherlock Holmes, magnifying glass and all, posing as if I was checking for evidence. I was under the impression that it was going to be like a mid section article, in black and white, not full colour, on the front page, but hey, the more exposure this thing gets, the more likely we are to catch the guy, so I’ll take one for the team. I also had a phone interview with The Press, one of New Zealand’s most distributed news papers. Bring on the 6:00pm news!

You can view the front page of today’s Greystar here in PDF format.

The video has since flown around the internet thanks to Google Video and Skoopy, on the 6th of Aug it was the 2nd most viewed movie on Google Video. I’d just like to say that the video is not a fake. To be perfectly honest, I don’t really care if people believe me or not. The reason we don’t have security chains on the laptops is simple, we want people to be able to pick them up and have a look at them, and this is the first time we’ve had anything walk out the door in five years. Studies have also been done showing that product that are secured down is less likely to sell than product that isn’t. Anyhow, more links:

NZHondas Thread
Google Video Link Cheers to James Nimmo for uploading this.

If anyone has any information that may lead to an arrest, email me on james@stubbedtoe.co.nz – There will definitely be some sort of reward offered.

This man stole our laptop

All I can say, is some people, either have balls of steel, or are incredibly stupid.

At 3:30pm today, I asked one of the other guys at work to setup a new machine we’d had delivered, he goes out to do it, and noticed that one of the laptops we have on display is missing, which he thinks is odd, because if anyone was going to sell one they would have sold one of the ones we have out the back, so he comes and asks me if I had sold it, or lent it to anyone, yadda yadda. We search the shop, workshop and our store, and can’t find it anywhere, so we resort to the video camera footage.

So we’re searching through the footage, rewinding hour by hour, at 2pm, it’s not there, at 1pm, it’s not there, at 12pm, it’s not there, but at 11am, it bloody is there! So we watch from there on in. We have a lady that works out in the shop, mainly receipting stock into our POS system, sales, accounts, banking, that sort of thing, and she’s helping a couple of people at the counter, when this old dude, probably early 50s, walks in with a large coat on. I go out to serve him.

“Hey mate, anything I can help you with?”
‘Na, just in out of the cold waiting for the kids’
“No worries, I’ll leave you to it, if you need a hand with anything just sing out and one of us will come help you”
‘Thanks’

I go back out to the workshop, and think nothing of it. He walks around the shop a bit more, looks out the back to where he can see our security monitor, so he can see exactly what we’re recording, and then heads over to one of the laptops. He folds the lid down, then looks up at the counter where there’s still the couple and our retail lady are. He gets in between the line of view from those three and the laptop. He picks it up with one hand, walks away with it a bit, does a kinda swing around motion, and then slips it into his jacket, grabs his cell phone out of his pocket, and pretends to talk on it as he walks out of the shop!

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I was watching this, it was insane, there were four staff members plus two customers in the shop and this guy tries his luck, and gets away with it! He’s gotta be fucking stupid though, he blatantly looks towards the cameras on several occasions.

I called the police straight away and then looked at the footage a bit closer. 10 minutes before he walks into the shop, he walks past from right to left. 3 minutes before he walks in he walks back past, after he leaves a Mitsi Pajero pulls out of a car park and screams off, where it was parked would have been about 6 seconds walk from our front door, which is how long it was before it did pull out…

Two police officers pulled up about 45 minutes later. They took down all the details, took some stills away, and I’ve gotta drop the video footage into them. They seemed pretty determined to catch the guy, and seemed offended when I told them I didn’t expect much :P

The thing is, the laptop is a brand new model, and it had no battery in it, so it’s completely useless to the guy. You can’t get a generic charger that’ll fit/have a high enough wattage (Without some serious rangi’n), and the charger for it is also a new model, so any older HP/Compaq chargers will not fit, so this guy is fucked. Hewlett Packard are putting a flag on any spare batteries or chargers ordered, and are putting out notice to every HP dealer in the country (That’s pretty tops).

All and all, I’m pretty fucked off. We’re insured, so the money issue isn’t a big one (Although there is still a pretty decent excess). I’m not so pissed off that it happened “under my watch” so to speak, just pissed off that we were all here and he still managed to pull it off. It would have almost been worth him doing it, just so I could have caught him doing it.

Anyhow, the juicy stuff:

More pics
NX6325_Thief_low.wmv 18.5mb, 480×320, 2:33min long.
NX6325_Thief_Hi.wmv 37.4mb, 640×480, 2:33min long.

Laptop Details:

Make: Hewlett Packard
Model: Compaq NX6325
Serial: CNU623154T
Product Number: RE950PA
Part Number: RE950PA#ABG

AMD Turion Dual Core 1.6ghz, 512mb ram, 60gb hard drive, DVRW. 15″ LCD, Modem, Wireless, usual other laptop shit, RRP about $1900..