A hell of a day. . . .

Feeling aggrieved? Why should I be feeling aggrieved right now?

Perhaps it might have something to do with the fact that I've had one of the worst professional weeks of my life, and to top it off, I just found out that my (relatively new and pricey) laptop bag was stolen from my office last night. And now I've been stuck at MIT for the last hour and a half waiting for a CP to show up so that I can report it as stolen and start getting it replaced! [What sort of campus emergency takes more than 90 minutes to deal with?] The only consolation in all of this is that my laptop was nowhere near the vicinity of my laptop bag, and that the library books I had taken home the previous day were out of the bag. And the extended wait gave me time to get the ball rolling with respect to insurance claims.

However, what strikes me as odd---or at the very least, showing not much intelligence on the part of the thief---is that in an office in which there is tons of valuable stuff out in the open (textbooks, software, etc.), the only thing that was taken was my laptop bag. Granted, it's a nice bag, but did the thief really feel the need to steal the notebook of reprints that was in there as well? [Somehow, I can't envision a thriving black market for papers on polymer physics.]

What makes this all the more distressing is that the keys to my office were changed just a few days ago, so hardly anyone would have had a chance to get ahold of the new keys---which means that either someone left a door propped open when they shouldn't have, or someone working at MIT is responsible. Neither of these scenarios is particularly cheerful.