Was I Robbed or am I Paranoid?

Attn: Post about the darker side of humanity follows, just not sure if is my mine.

If there is one generalisation that I can make about Brazilians [other than their collective sweet tooth] it is that they are a pretty honest lot. Well, okay, maybe not the stray ones who rob you outright, but on the whole, Brazilians from all walks of life are a credible, honest, and generous people. Waiters will chase after you to give you 15 cents in change. Taxi drivers will round down and charge you less than the metre shows (this is also due in part to the small change crisis). Vendors will go out of their way to find your five cents of change. Chambermaids will not take the small change left on the pillow not sure whether it was intended for them or not. That said ....

Ten years ago, when I was living and travelling in El Salvador and Guatemala, we were robbed from our hotel room in the centre of San Salvador. Being recent grads of rather humble means, one of our goals was to spend as little money as possible to sleep at night [I guess it wasn't so much a goal, as it was a means]. A consequence of this strategy was that we often ended up staying in places of questionable repute. Guidebooks on Central America give two main warnings: 1) do not leave anything of value in your hotel room; and 2) do not carry anything of value with you in the streets. Now, maybe it is just me, but these two warnings do not seem to be compatible one with the other. Since Hotels of Questionable Repute rarely have safes, either in the rooms or at the front desk, one ends up making a choice. Our choice in San Salvador was to not carry anything of value with us in the streets.

During this particular stop in El Salvador's capital city, we changed quite a bit of money from travellers' cheques [remember those??] to colones before heading back to our village near the Honduran border. We changed the money, counted the bills, and headed back to the hotel. We stashed our loot deep in our backpacks, carefully placing the surrounding clothes and accoutrements in random-looking, but actually very specific patterns. Oh we were suave. And then we went out to find something to eat. We returned to the hotel several hours later only to discover that the backpack had been carefully rummaged through and that several hundred colones were missing.

Now, this is a favourite strategy of inside jobs. Thieves just skim a little bit of money off your stash so as to create confusion in your mind as to whether or not you have been robbed, or whether or not you just spent more money then you thought. It's a clever technique considering the fact that most people are not fully aware of how much money they have on them at any given time. On the flip side, this technique does not work on people who are tracking their expenditures to a dime [yes, times were rough!] and just changed money at the bank. Needless to say, we moved out of the hotel and headed to a nicer neighbourhood. The new hotel cost a whopping US$22 -- but we decided that the extravagence was worth it. Several other friends of mine have all been robbed in this way from hotel rooms around the world. That said ....

On Thursday morning, knowing that I had several bills to pay and only R$10 to my name, I headed to the bank just after 7am and withdrew R$1000 (CAN$500). Prior to leaving for work, I left R$200 with the cleaning lady. At lunch time, I ate at the restaurant next door and then hopped a cab home and back to pick up a document which I had forgotten [total expense R$25]. At 2pm, I paid the office cleaner R$90. At 3pm, I took another cab [R$25] to go for an interview at a radio station and at 4:45pm, I spent another R$20 on a cab back to the office. Once in the office, I pulled out my wallet to pay a few more bills only to discover that I only had R$400. Simply math led me to the conclusion that I was missing R$250.

Now, like most people, I often wonder where my money goes and how come it goes so quickly. Often, I have to stop to think back on the week's purchases to see if the amounts more or less add up to my cash on hand. But in this case, it hadn't even been ten hours since I withdrew the money, and I had been at the office almost every minute of that time. I racked my brain to think if I could have dropped some bills somewhere; paid another bill which I was not recalling; or whether some money could have fallen between the cushions in one of the cabs. But all the time, my mind kept thinking back to the 30 minutes or so at the radio station when I left my bag in the studio to take a tour of the grounds. Could it be that my money was taken while I was touring the grounds? Or am I truly forgetting something else that I paid? Or did I lose it somewhere between two points? The most unfortunate part of the story is that I had taken out personal money to pay for office expenses to be reimbursed in the next financial reporting period. This was never really an issue in Canada since I use my credit card for almost all my purchases and essentially live a cashless existence. Well, at the very least I learned a lesson. Never ever ever leave your bag unattended, even in a supposedly secure environment. I think that I already knew this lesson. I guess that it just needed some reinforcing.