Thanks for nothing, ThinkPad bandit
Brent McConkey & Shaw Lentz
Student Columnists

> February 16, 2001

To the guy who broke into our Student Apartment,

First of all, we just want to congratulate you on your successful breaking and entering. Really! Given the relatively well-lit nature of our section of Student Apartments, it’s difficult to comprehend just how difficult it must have been for you to cut out our bathroom window screen, pull out the storm window, push down the pesky window which heretofore had been painted shut, and hurl yourself into our shower. Kudos!

You have truly earned your distinction as the “ThinkPad Bandit.” And Brent also gives you props for your clever allusion to the Beatles’ somewhat overshadowed Abbey Road track, “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.” Touché.

To that end, we have come up with a few suggestions on the best ways to appreciate the stuff you stole from our room. After all, now that these items are in your possession, they are technically your things and we want you to derive as much pleasure as possible from them. As the French say, “finders keepers,” assuming of course that by “find” we mean to skillfully violate the bedroom of the two students at this university who actually make their own car payments.

Naturally, the two ThinkPads represent the biggest accomplishment of your heist and could result in a nice financial windfall. In addition, they also propel you into “grand larceny” status, which should make your mom and dad proud. We encourage you to examine them and take advantage of some of the features we have saved over the past four years. Brent really doesn’t have anything of significance on his ThinkPad, instead using it primarily to save pictures of himself for submission to www.amihotornot.com (8.7 rating by the way).

Shaw, on the other hand, has a wide array of internet soccer site bookmarks which should appeal to a futból enthusiast such as yourself, assuming your hobbies go beyond the occasional petty burglary. The best is www.dailysoccer.com, updated by the minute from a satellite feed to keep you abreast of all the latest soccer news and scores (it has pictures too!). He also appreciates that despite your obvious love for the beautiful game, you refrained from taking the autographed photo of Pelé, the autograph of Ruud Gullit and the copy of Johan Cruyff’s Ajax, Barcelona, Cruyff: the ABC’s of an Obstinate Maestro. Thanks for recognizing these items as too precious to deprive someone of them.

Of course you didn’t stop with the ThinkPads, instead opting next to relieve us of the burden of our five-disk CD player. Brent, frankly, was a little flattered that you chose to leave his four CD’s in the player as you took it, and assumes that you must really admire his taste in music. Take a good listen to Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted disc, which you probably noticed placed 5fifth on Spin magazine’s list of the 90 Greatest Albums of the 90s. Hint: if you brag to all your buddies about how this album helped define indie rock in the early part of the last decade, it’ll make you sound like quite the scenester! We probably don’t need to lay out the musical merits and alternative stylings of Belly and the Cardigans, but you may not have heard of the Jayhawks’ Hollywood Town Hall. You are in for quite a treat. Rolling Stone calls this album, “the band’s greatest triumph” and “as raggedly beautiful as any in recent memory.” Despite the sentimental value of this album as one of Brent’s favorites, he encourages you to fulfill the unspoken duty of Jayhawks fans everywhere by raising awareness of this underappreciated band. Carry the torch, my friend.

Although we apologize for not being able to offer you more with our meager possessions, your final choice, the VCR, was honestly a curious selection due to its somewhat shoddy nature. But, beggars can’t be choosers, and we understand that you were probably under a little time crunch to leave before the two of us came home, hog-tied you with duct tape, tossed you in the bathtub, and covered you with pancake syrup (we assure you it would have been in good fun). Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the VCR is its inability to play in color, unless it is tilted at an extreme forty-five degree angle. By the way, if you want to come and return the tape of last week’s episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we’ll gladly give you the remote control, which you apparently forgot amongst the chaos of the situation. We can’t all be perfect.

As a last word, we want to reassure you that we are not bitter over the loss of our items. Shaw, in particular has put a quite positive spin on the experience, likening it to a mother giving up her newborn for adoption. The way he sees it, our stuff is going to a better home where hopefully it will enjoy a more caring, more nurturing environment. He’s convinced that you are probably just a down-on-your luck father, looking to make ends meet and perhaps put some food on your family’s table. He’s even been in contact with Career Services to see if he could somehow work this into his resume under “community service.” Incidentally, Brent feels otherwise, maintaining that you’re just some kind of low-life, small-time, mouth-breathing gutter punk, though to argue such a meaningless point is to ponder how many angels can dance on the head on a pin. In any case, we sincerely hope you enjoy your new things. Take good care of them.