The December 23, 2015 issue of the San Jose Mercury News had front page story about foxes stealing food and other things from golf carts at one of our local courses, Los Lagos.
(Must have been a slow news day.) The foxes are cute and fun to watch, but they are very clever thieves. We experienced this first hand a few days later.
We played
golf at Los Lagos, starting about 10:45. I usually walk but Gale and I shared a cart since it was cold and the carts were restricted to the paths only since the course was pretty wet due to our recent rains. Gale has a small purse that she took with her and had it stored in the cart. In the purse were her
driver’s license, credit cards, some money and her cellphone. We had a good time, although as I said it was cold.
My car said 41 degrees when we got to the course. The foxes were there, especially at the first green and the third tee, and looked
very nice in their full winter coats. I think we saw six or seven between the two prime fox locations.
When we were finished and unloading our golf bags from the cart, Gale realized that her small purse was missing. Very upsetting! She took off in the cart to backtrack along the path, looking for her purse. I went into the pro shop and had
the desk man radio the course marshal to have him look and ask other golfers if they found a purse. Then I had the idea to use Find My Phone. Both Gale and I have Apple phones, which in our family is pretty much a requirement as our son Todd works at Apple. I
had to think for a while to remember Gales Apple password, but I did it, fired up Find My Phone, and sure enough it showed a phone somewhere on the course. The course
is not mapped very accurately, but it showed where I was and where the phone was in a sea of green. I had the pro shop guy radio the marshal to come get me so we could drive
to the phone’s location. Both the marshal and Gale came back to the pro shop (she had thought of Find My Phone also), I got in the cart with the marshal and she followed
us as we navigated to where my phone showed hers to be. There were four foxes watching us with smiles on their faces as we arrived at the apparent location of her phone;
we stomped through the long grass in the indicated location close to the first green, and within five minutes we found it. The purse was unharmed, they had not made any calls
or used her credit cards.
Gale was very happy.
A few months ago Gale had her phone stolen. She works at All Horizons Travel in Los Altos. The agency has desks in two different large rooms. Gale’s desk is in the back room. She had her phone with her at her desk and had been using it, but she left it on her desk to attend an all employee meeting in the front office. The meeting lasted 20 minutes or so. When she returned to her desk the phone was not there. She looked on the desk, under the desk, in her purse, even went out to her car to see if for some reason it was there. No phone. There is another office behind the agency, and a door from the back parking lot to both that office and to the back of the agency. Gale asked the woman who works in the other office if she had seen any strangers go into the agency in the past 20 – 30 minutes. Sure enough, the woman said
that a man had been in trying to sell her raffle tickets. She described the man as very short and wearing a red shirt. Gale called the Los Altos police. She also called me. I was
at the dentist, but was able to stop the exam and describe to her how to do Find My Phone. Another travel agent had an Apple phone, they fired up Find My Phone and within
minutes had her phone located at the Peet’s Coffee up the block. About this time the police arrived. They were all excited because in Los Altos there is never any crime. OH BOY, a theft. The police told Gale to keep looking at the phone and to call them if her phone moved, while they waited for back up. (Slow crime day.) The phone did move – toward Safeway, Gale did call, the police said that they had the thief in custody. They returned
the phone to her. Yea!
So the thief was obviously not the brightest bulb on the
string. Red shirt, he went to Peet’s Coffee rather than getting away, and he did not turn the phone off which would have disabled Find My Phone. So what happened to the thief? Since a phone isn’t valuable enough for it to be a felony theft, the police took him to the border of Los
Altos and told him to never come back. They also called his boss, the raffle ticket company and got him fired. Selling tickets without a license. And presumably for being stupid.
Gale called me, still at the dentist, told me the outcome, I put her on my speaker so she could entertain the dentist office with the story. Very cool.