At gun point

In half an hour's time it will have been a week since someone pointed a gun at me and threated to shoot me in the foot if I didn't give him my laptop, my mobiles (he insisted he knew I had two, I don't know how he knew it or if he was just trying his luck), all my money and jwellery. early enough in the evening: 8.30pm is not that late for me to leave work.

"Maybe the weapon's a fake", I thought, but decided not to risk it. With his left hand he pulled the laptop bag off my shoulders and I gave me one and then both my mobiles, and then took the money out of my wallet, keeping it inside my purse, which I managed to keep out of reach - he had his hands full with the gun and the laptop - and he finally took off in the direction of the parking lot where I was heading to get my car. I got back inside the building and called the police.

I went through all the drill: discription, double questioning to see if I recalled anything else, and I know the police is out there to get him - because they have contacted me while they were in the area. The problem is catching him red-handed. And that's pretty hard to do.

Last wednesday it happened again to another girl. By the description it was the same guy. She resisted, and tried to run, he pulled her laptop bag throwing her down. She grabbed his leg - but finally let go when he cocked up the gun. It seems it wasn't a dummy gun...

In the end I feel I was extremely lucky: I was alone, there was a rather empty and extremely dark field just across the street, he could have forced me to go to the ATM and get cash, he could have perceived I was walking to my car instead of the metro and taken that too, he could have taken all my documents. A very bad nightmare could have started.

True the loss of information is, well, tragic. I had backups of my phone on my laptop, and I had hidden codes on the mobile. Pending issues were lots, mementos that hadn't backed up yet. For some odd luck I work a lot on website developement and maintenace so all my stuff is already out in the world and I just have to retrieve the access to the servers. A password was needed to get to my user area - so I guess they will just format the whole thing. Just in case my decade-old passwords were changed and I still haven't gotten used to them.

But I'm alive, I'm in one piece, I kept my integrity - and now I "invested" in a parking space in the garage. As my good friend D. put it, it took a robbery to upgrade my status ;-)

Keep cool, don't resist, try to reason with the guy but keep it short.
And ALWAYS report to the police. You may not see them, but they are there.