It took me a while as a kid in Sioux Falls to learn to lock up my bicycle- one of my bikes was actually stolen 3 times. The first time was a kid from school that stole both my brother's and my bike from our house- we found them sitting next to his house and I later got payback in a fight I got in with him at school, the second time I left my bike in the front yard of a friends house before it disappeared...that night or the next day I found it sitting in a bike rack at a public pool not too far away....the 3rd time I went to Lewis Drug, failed to chain it up, and it never turned up at which point I think I finally learned my lesson.
One of the wierder instances, however, was when I somehow managed to leave my tennis racket at the courts just down the street from our house and it disappeared. About 3 or 4 months later, a kid was at the courts playing with a much more beat up version of what had been my once-nice tennis racket. I went up to him, grabbed it out of his hands, looked at it and could tell without a doubt that it was the one I had lost. The kid said he "found it" and to give it back, and when I told him tough luck he went home and got his dad to come and confront me about taking his kid's tennis racket. After explaining to his dad exactly how I knew it was my racket, I told him that I could go home and get the card that had the serial number printed on it (that could still be read on the racket itself), and once I did he could then pay me for the full price of the racket as his snot-nosed kid had managed to crack the frame, rip off all the grip, etc., making it only a matter of time before the racket was totally unusable/ worthless- surprisingly, being a wiseass kid at an early age really paid off for me as the agressive dad walked away immediately.
Come to think of it- outside of the 3rd time my bike was stolen, I've had pretty good luck getting lost things back- my car has been stolen (in So. Mpls) and returned, I've lost my wedding ring in some veritable 'haystacks' on a number of ocassions but managed to retrieve it each time, and I even lost a pair of glasses in the Pacific Ocean once only to have them wash back up on shore a few hours later. Now if only I could get some of the valuables that were in my car when it was stolen back- I always assumed they'd turn up sooner or later, but I guess I'm not in Sioux Falls anymore
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