I think about it, more often than you would think. Not for revenge or with a sense of indignity, but with curiosity and discontentment. Did they know or care? Would it still make a profit? Did they think they would be able to work it out somehow?
When I lived in San Diego with my parents I had a problem holding onto my car stereos. In fact, I had three stolen car stereos during a short time. It was rough. I looked into different expensive products including an alarm system for my car that would notify a keychain dongle if anything was amiss.
I started taking the faceplate into my room at night. It seemed like this would be the proper deterrent to further theft. I thought that if someone were thinking about taking my car stereo, they would look inside and see the faceplate missing and move on. Or they would still break in and look in the usual spots that they knew their victims would put the faceplate – in the glove compartment, under the seat, in the center console – and not finding it they would leave the stereo and move on to the next car.
But this did not work. One night, despite my logic that a faceplateless car stereo would be worthless, someone stole my car stereo. I think about this a lot. Did they go through all the effort of taking the stereo out and then realize that the faceplate wasn’t even in the car? Were they pissed? But why did they take it still?
I feel bad about this. I’m not even upset about the stereo being stolen anymore. I’m upset that forever the faceplate and stereo will be separated. It depresses me. I held onto the faceplate for a long time. It seemed too valuable of an object to just throw away. I wanted to somehow connect them again. No questions asked. It wasn’t even necessary for it to be returned to me.
Eventually, I think the faceplate was thrown out or was taken to a thrift store to sit and be useless. I’m not even sure. But I hope that wherever the worthless faceplate and the empty stereo went that they were destroyed and don’t continue to exist.