Things not to steal.

Hi all,

Hope you're doing well this evening.

4.5 weeks of class down.  I can't wait for this term to be over, lemmetellya.

So this morning, I hear on the news that there was a shooting over someone stealing "tires."  That's what the newslady said.

Is it just me, or are there many many things wrong with stealing tires?

I'm going to give the criminal the benefit of the doubt - we'll say he/she was stealing rims, lets say.  As we all know, custom rims are pretty pricey - going from say, 100 bones a piece to sky high multi-thousand davin rims.

Anyway, so it got me thinking - apparently, my mind is pretty active in the morning - who knew?

If I were to steal something from a car, probably the last thing I'd steal is rims.  Working alone, that's a ton of work (and requires a lot of equipment).  Picture this:

You'd need the follwoing:
- a NASCAR style floor jack
- a big vehicle to carry around the rims that you've stolen
- a tire iron / wrench of some sort that could get lug nuts off quickly
- 4 cinder blocks per car

So what are we talkin here - I'd need some sort of truck or van to cart all this crap aruond, right?

OK, so let's say somehow you have all the equipment, including a swank panel van to move it all around in. 

(Again, working alone.)

OK, so you stop the van, get out the floor jack.  You gotta get it under the car, and crank a few times.  Provided that the owner doesn't have some sort of lock on their lug nuts, you have to break them free.  Times 4 or 5.  Then you have to try and get the tire off.  Anyone whose changed a tire before knows that wheels are pretty hard to get off a car if they haven't been rotated in a while.

Once you finally get the tire off, you gotta put the cinder block down, release the jack, and let the car back down.

(1 down, 3 to go)

Now lets say you've been lucky, and you get one or two off with no problem.  Don't you think someone would notice that you're taking all the wheels off a car?

(hmm, maybe he is swapping his tires for cinderblocks)

Even if you had one of those air compressor tool kits (another thing to lug around in the van).  Woudln't someone notice the trademark airhammer sound?

come on.

I just don't get it.

Even if you had a whole team of people working on one car - someone's gotta notice, right?  Even way early in the morning?

Plus, you have to be relatively careful with getting the rims - nobody's going to buy rims that are all scratched up and dented.

Being a thief is tough.

Now if you were steaing tires (for real), that's even more work!  I guess you'd take the whole wheel to your shop where you have the tire and wheel separator tool thingy (I am sure there's some sort of technical name, just don't know it)

Anyway, the moral of the story is - don't steal rims

Woo hah.  That was a long story.

So I was out with my group members today and I was complaining about how I need to get more sleep - and were discussing why I never get to sleep earlier.

I think I'm addicted to the internet.

I was joking that I need one of those parental control programs where it shuts down the computer at 11:30 p.m. or so.

Warning!  Warning!  System will shut down in 5 minutes)

So, I'm going to make more of an effort to unplug earlier in the evening.  Like 11:30 or so.  Think it's going to work?

I may have to resort to the patch.

-Kirk