766: Well Someone Had to Do SOMETHING!
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeper in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, ThisAmericanLife.org. From WBEZChicago, it's This American Life. I'm Sean Cole sitting in for Ira Glass. This is not a story about bicycle theft. It's a story about a counterintuitive impulse exhibited by the human species, in which a lot of bicycles happen to get stolen. The first bike belonged to a physical therapist named Carrie Helminger, this was in Seattle back in 2015. She rode her bike to work like always, locked it up securely like always, and when she came down to get it at the end of the day, it was gone. She felt about this, how you might imagine. Mad, you know, like, why do you want my bike and now how am I going to get home and it's laid and I'm tired and just frustrated and pissed and all that. The cops were remarkably responsive, came right away. They were also deeply pessimistic, said all the usual things, you're not likely to get it back, we get reports like this all the time, there's really nothing we can do, unless something happens. Carrie wasn't sure what that meant, until something did happen. She was at work the next day, tending to her physical therapy patients, only checking her phone now and then between appointments. And I remember seeing this text from a number that I didn't know that just said something like I may have found your bike. And I'm like what, what do I do with that, you know? I don't know who you are, is this a joke, is this a scam, like that was the thing that kept crossing my mind a lot, is like is this a weird scam. Were you like trying to mathematically figure in your head, like how the scam might have worked if it was a scam? I mean, I don't know how they would know it was me, so this is the thing that I kept trying to figure out, like would they steal my bike and then know it's me and then ask me for money and then they'd make money on it and they'd give me my bike back and they'd got, you know, $100 more or something. Which Carrie says that would have been fine with hers, better than having no bike. Anyway, she didn't know how to respond. Put the phone down, examined more hips and shoulders and knees, came back to another text. That said, was your bike stolen? I think I may have found it on Craigslist. And so I'm like, okay, so this is the same guy, you know, more questions. And so I'm like, yes, it was stolen, who are you? And then I think, you know, at that point, he probably responded and said, I was looking for a bike for my wife. I was looking for a bike for my wife and this ad came up on Craigslist. Real questionable. This is the guy who was texting, Dirk DeGroote works in marine construction, big cyclist himself. By questionable, he means the ad was poorly written and listed the bike for way less than it should have cost. A couple of blurry pictures taken at night and you're thinking, who the hell takes pictures at night? And so I did a little, you know, some googling and I found bike index.
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