Complacency
My wife’s good friend was robbed today.
A group of friends and former colleagues from my wife’s former company gathered this evening for a much anticipated reunion dinner at a popular restaurant in a well-travelled soi in an upscale area in the financial district. At 6:50 pm, the sun was beginning to set, but there was enough daylight to easily mistaken the time of day to be several hours earlier.
My wife’s friend and her husband had parked their car a few meters from the restaurant and were about to step in from off the street when a man on a motorcycle raced past, snatching her purse. The rider was halfway down the street before she could scream or her husband could react. Half a party at a police station filing a police report, half a party guarding the car from the possible return of a thief armed with stolen car keys, and one ruined evening for an entire party of friends.
The relatively low rate of petty crime in the central business district can make it easy for one to grow complacent. My wife and her friends are still a bit shellshocked, and I’m that much more paranoid (as well as a bit delusional to boot, nursing fantasies of foiling a purse snatching on my wife, followed by me beating the would-be thief within an inch of his life).
The moral of the story: keep alert, and be wary of motorcycle riders with no license plates on the bike.
You know why women tend to get robbed, don’t you? It’s because they accessorise so much. They have things dangling off every bit of themselves just screaming to the nearest hoodlum “STEAL ME!”.
Damn, dude, that sucks. Something like that can really shake you up; I hope she’s doing OK.
Why not let us know exactly where this occurred?
blue: the point of the post wasn’t to indicate a specific restaurant where this happened, but to highlight the fact that it could happen almost anywhere in bangkok, even in relatively nice, high-traffic areas.
can it really happen anywhere?–i doubt it… or is that just political correctness? it’s much more likely that there are trouble-spots it would be nice to know about… well, nevermind
How is advocating personal safety a matter of political correctness? And do you doubt that crime can happen simply because you’ve never been a victim of it? “I’ve never been robbed in Bangkok, so it must be a safe place?”
The way I have overcome any potential problems of theft since I got here is to carry as little as possible with me when I go anywhere and if I MUST take my wallet, I wear super tight jeans so I can always tell of anyone is trying to pilfer it (I’m sure you’re all just dying to see a photo of me in super tight jeans now).