What the thief left in my bag

The next morning, in a room in Graça with a window looking onto a wall, I emptied the bag onto the bed.

Nine objects. Not my favorite things, not the most expensive, not the most useful. They’re the ones a stranger touched, looked at, and set back down, in a train carriage, in a few seconds, without light and without time.

In other words, someone had just drawn up a ranking of my own belongings, using criteria that weren’t mine, and I could read it.

The hard drive

Two terabytes, in a gray fabric pouch that looks like a hotel toiletry bag. Four years of files, three of which exist nowhere else, which is an admission I’m making here once and won’t make again.

It was at the bottom, under the cables. Soft to the touch, no hard edges, nothing that looks like a device. If I had to rank what I was carrying by actual value, it would come first, far ahead of the computer, which is just an object I can replace in four days.

It stayed.

The security key

A black plastic rectangle the size of a knuckle, with a hole for a keyring. It unlocks my accounts, my client access, my email, and the account that hosts this site.

It was in the front pocket. The one that opens by pulling a tab, in a second, without any effort, and that’s the first thing you find when you reach into a bag.

Taken along with the computer, it would have turned this from an expensive annoyance into a sleepless night followed by three days of revoking access. It looks like a promotional keyring from a car garage.

It stayed.

The mouse

A small wireless Logitech, with a receiver plugged into a slot above the logo. This is my third of the same model. The first two disappeared, one in a room in Split, the other on a night bus whose route I no longer remember.

Each time, I bought the exact same one again, without even looking at what else was out there. I should probably be ashamed of that sentence given what I spend my days doing. I’m writing it anyway, because half the people reading this operate the same way with at least one object, and nobody ever admits it.

It stayed, and I understand why. Nobody steals a mouse.

The chargers, the adapter, the cables

Four objects, one line each, because they don’t deserve more.

• A universal laptop charger, the one for the computer that’s gone, now orphaned and perfectly useless for four days.
• A cheap phone charger bought in Portugal two weeks earlier.
• A plug adapter I’ve been hauling around out of superstition ever since a trip where I actually needed it once.
• A bundle of cables held together with an office elastic band, two of which have been useless for a long time.

The thief left them. It’s the one point on which his ranking and mine agree.

What wasn’t in the bag

Three objects survived for a different reason: they weren’t there.

The phone, a Galaxy S22 bought in spring 2022, in the right pocket of my pants, where it’s lived for four years. The passport, in my jacket, because the conductor had asked for it that morning and I hadn’t put it away. And an old Android tablet with a projector built into the hinge, my hotel-room cinema, in the small bag I keep between my feet.

Those three owe nothing to any ranking. They owe their survival to a pants pocket, a moment of distraction, and a mental boundary I’d set for the wrong reasons: the tablet isn’t for work, so it doesn’t go with the work gear.

The thief’s ranking

Go back over the list and look at what he did with it.

He took two objects, a computer and an empty case. He left a drive holding three years of irreplaceable work, the key that unlocks all my accounts, and a mouse worth the price of a meal.

His criterion isn’t price. It’s not use value either, which he has no way of knowing. It’s resemblance: does this object look like an expensive object? A molded case says yes. A fabric pouch says no. A three centimetre piece of black plastic says nothing at all, and saying nothing is the best protection on this entire list.

The most unsettling part isn’t that he got it wrong. It’s that so did I. I’d put the single most critical thing in my bag, the security key, in the most accessible pocket, because I pulled it out often and it was convenient. My own ranking was based on frequency of use. His was based on appearance. Neither one was based on what actually matters, which is what I can’t replace.

What I changed

Two things, and neither costs anything.

The security key no longer sleeps next to the machine it unlocks. It now lives in a jacket pocket, with my papers, and I lose three seconds a day looking for it.

The backup drive no longer travels in the same bag as the machine it backs up. It’s an annoying constraint, because it forces me to carry two bags on days when one would have done.

I didn’t buy a padlock, a lock, or a tracker.

I don’t try most of what I talk about on this site, and I lay that out in detail in what I don’t try. The objects above are part of the minority: they’re mine, they have years of use behind them, and that’s why I allow myself to talk about them the way I just did. It still doesn’t let me tell you they’re better than anything else. I haven’t tried the others.

There’s one thing I didn’t do, and I still think about it. I never checked whether the hard drive actually worked. It sat in the bag for six weeks before I plugged it in, because I was so relieved it was still there that the idea of checking it never crossed my mind. An object you’ve recovered isn’t an object you’ve verified, and I got lucky.