When The Going Gets Tough

July has been a rough month for me. First getting sick and not being able to find a solution. I spent a week in bed, missed out on my Croatian holiday and now have a lengthy medical bill that I need to pay off.

Just as I was starting to feel better and get back into the swing of things, life has handed me another cards to handle. Sometime over night between Thursday and Friday, our office was broken into and items stolen. One of those items happened to be my laptop.

It was an interesting experience seeing the Hungarian police at work. First of all, it took ages for them to arrive. We called them around 9 in the morning and they arrived just after noon, 3 hours later. It was actually a bit strange. I got to the office around 10, but they wouldn’t let me into the building. They had shut down the whole street and had police and firemen everywhere. I was a bit shocked because surely they don’t need to do that for a simple robbery right? Well it turns out that a chimney on the adjoining building had fallen over the night before onto our building and they had to secure the area.

When the police finally showed up at our office they took down a report and then made a call to headquarters. We were told that a detective will come at some point during the day before 8pm. So that meant we needed to stay in the office until they showed up. Meanwhile, the police officer who had originally come to get statements had to stay at our office. He stood outside the whole time. Apparently its to provide security or something. I felt so bad for the guy. He had to stand outside for hours doing absolutely nothing.

Thankfully the detective showed up earlier than expected – at around 4pm. He was the most casually dressed guy ever. He was in a t-shirt, jeans and sneakers. And sitting on his hip? A gun! It was such a strange juxtaposition. Such oppositions. Only in Hungary I guess.

The past two days, I’ve been a bundle of nerves. I’m just so paranoid now – paranoid about my health, paranoid about my possessions. Its not a comfortable feeling. I am more upset over the documents and files that I’ve lost on my computer as opposed to the computer itself. I can always replace a computer, but the files are the important things. Thankfully I had the foresight a couple weeks ago to start backing up work files onto a work server so not all is lost. Most of the important information is still there, but a lot is still missing. On a personal side, I had done a back up of my computer in mid May so in reality I only lost about 2 months worth of stuff and none of my photos. So in the big scheme of things, it could have been much much worse, but I am thankful that it wasn’t. Its just a big inconvenience and I am constantly reminded of it whenever I realize I no longer have this or that file.