A friend mine related this story to me about his friend that was driving through Slough on the A4 last week, as he stopped at one of the many traffic lights along that road, a pretty young girl opened the front passenger door of his car and jumped in. “I just lost my purse and I have no money! Can you take me to Slough Station?” she asked.
After a few moments of thinking and initially asking her to get out of the car, and the traffic lights turning to green (with the accompanying ‘hurry-up’ horns from behind), he agreed to take her along to the station, perhaps not the right thing to do! As they were driving to the station he asked her where she was headed. The girl replied that she was on the way to Southampton and perhaps it might be a good idea if he took her there instead!
Just then, they arrived at another set of traffic lights on red! As he stopped, he demanded that she get out of the car or he would drive to a police station; the girl did as she was told, seemingly quite upset at being ‘dumped’ out of the car. He then drove off to his meeting destination, calling in at a petrol station for another journey later in the day… Yes you’ve guessed it, when he came to pay for the petrol, his wallet was missing from his jacket!
Was this story about me, no! I’ve always kept my car doors locked in built up areas ever since two incidents that happened to me some 25 years ago. During the Cheltenham Gold Cup week, two rather shady looking characters jumped into my car outside of Cheltenham railway station and demanded to be taken to the race course. Did I do as requested, yes! Compliance being the lesser of what I though could have been at the time, a bit of a nasty incident. Doors now locked in towns!
The second incident happened not to me, but I saw one and read about many others happening over a period of a month. I used to travel down to London from Cheltenham as a service engineer to visit clients etc. I always used the A40/Westway in and out of that part of London and one particular set of traffic lights (A40/Old Oak Common Lane, I think) always seemed to back up the traffic going back out of London in the evening. The only advantage of this was that at that set of traffic lights, you could always buy a copy of the London Evening Standard from the lads that ran up and down the central concrete wall.
One night I was stopped in the traffic queue at the lights, when from across the other side of road these two other lads ran over, smashed the rear window on the drivers side of the car in front and high-tailed it off with his jacket, needless to say containing his wallet etc. The following weeks saw a number of repeat incidents, but soon stopped, due I suppose to police action. Of course this was before we had the massive amounts of CCTV and traffic cameras that we have in place today.
Could they (the cameras) be a deterrent that worked? I haven’t travelled that route for years so have no idea if the incidents ever reoccurred! I can only say that the two incidents told me too things…
Keep your car doors locked at all times, especially in built up areas and never keep anything of value in your jacket/coat pockets on the back seat of your car.
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