So thieves broke into your storage unit - again

If you've been wondering why entries have been a little slow lately, let me tell you a story.

All collectors tend to be a bit obsessive by nature, and us classic computer nerds probably pick up more hardware than we can (or should) store in our residence — especially if the loves of our lives aren't as enthusiastic about the hobby than we are — and thus have storage units for the overflow. I have two small "cold" climate control units, kept small so that I can be out of one or both relatively quickly, as well as a larger "hot" conventional unit at ambient temperature. The hot unit is indoors and not exposed directly to the sun, so it's not particularly hot for sunny southern California, but I keep working spare electronics, hard disks, tapes, etc. in the cold units as a precaution and use the hot unit for non-working parts units, books, magazines and other household items.

Of course, climate control units cost more, sometimes substantially, and thieves use this as a signal that more valuable stuff is likely to be kept there:

Both times I've been burglarized, they were the cold units. August was the second time. So, with crime being a nationwide topic, let's talk about what happens when your storage unit gets broken into and how to recover from it.

The first time was not quite two decades ago at a now defunct national chain. I was obviously rather younger then and didn't recognize that these units were incredibly poorly secured: they had simple plywood doors that opened out as opposed to metal roll-ups, the "latch" (such as it was) was just a regular safety hasp your padlock went on, and the door hinges were completely exposed. The exterior door to the climate control units (because there must be one to keep the climate controlled air in) was a regular unlocked door without any security cameras. According to the police, a couple of tweekers decided to use the climate units as free air conditioned apartments and intermittently took up residence in many of them, including mine. I had the good sense to use a disc lock instead of a regular padlock, but while they may have been drug-addled they turned out to be smarter than I was. Instead of attacking the lock they just pulled the hinge pins (only two) and got in without even touching the door, the lock or the hasp, and then were able to pull the door closed and escape discovery on walkthrus. By moving around they apparently weren't noticed for days.

When a storage unit is hit, the police report that the facility files and any insurance claim they make are completely separate from yours. They may or may not use information from you, but you still have to file your own. During their vacation in my two units they stole and likely hocked my family's Panasonic VHS video camera, which didn't have any tapes we cared about but would have been fun to keep, as well as my first digital camera, an Olympus Camedia something or other that used SmartMedia and still had some photos on it I realized later I never downloaded, a Fisher-Price PXL2000 (the famous pixelicious video camera that uses regular audio cassettes instead of videotape) I had in its original box that I got to use exactly once, and my spare boxed Mattel Intellivision. They also stole a few items from my highway signs collection and even spray-painted a couple I suppose for lulz, and generously left some rather grotty drug paraphernalia and dirty blankets in trade which the police took as evidence.

Only one of those items was recovered, the Intellivision (the one item I cared about least since that was a totally spare unit). It turned up at a pawn shop on the other side of the freeway. California law, at least at that time, said that the pawn shop had to be reimbursed what they paid: they couldn't sell it to you at retail, but they also were to be made whole. I went over with someone from the police department and I think it cost me $60 to recover it; I still have it. The cop also quietly pointed out all the things that were wrong with the storage units and told me to get out the rest of my stuff and leave at my earliest opportunity since they would almost certainly be hit again.

But what about making me whole? I was required to have insurance on the units, but I just had an apartment at the time and didn't carry renter's insurance, so I paid a premium as part of my rental fees to the chain's "insurance partner." If this smells like a kickback deal, you're right, and virtually every self-storage company engages in it. The idea is to offer you something cheap so that the insurance company will then protect the storage company by deflecting claims. The insurance is cheap because it sucks. I had a police report, obviously, but when I tried to submit the claims for each unit — on paper, as we did in the Dark Ages at the beginning of the 21st century — they were rejected for insufficient documentation (because who keeps a receipt for the Intellivision you bought five years ago from a thrift store?) and I was hardly in a position to sue them over it.

As the cop instructed, I bailed out of there a couple months later. The doors had not been upgraded, there was still no lock on the exterior entrance, and the manager said installing cameras would be too expensive. I made sure to note on my "exit survey" that I was leaving because their security was worse than a Russian garrison after a vodka waffle party. The chain subsequently folded and got sold to some other megastorage company and I imagine they're still too cheap to do anything about it.

The current break-in was a bit more professional because the facility I moved to was obviously more serious about security (they could hardly have been less). When I first moved in, the climate control section had proper roll-up doors and sliding security latches, and there were cameras scattered around the premises, but the exterior door was also just a regular door and usually left unlocked. One of the local unhoused encampments noticed this and moved in, leaving a mess and requiring forcible eviction by the police, though they didn't manage to get into any occupied units. After that the management installed a cipher lock-type door handle and issued unique codes to each tenant.

We own a house now, but my particular homeowner's insurance policy doesn't cover rental units (I read every page, believe me). Even though the "partner" insurance was useless the first time around, I still went with the company this facility was getting kickbacks from since it was the cheapest alternative. After all, I figured if I got hit again they wouldn't pay off this time either, so I might as well spend as little money as possible on it.

The door handle only controlled the latch; there was no deadbolt. So what do you do to attack a door like that? You crowbar it and pry the latch open (see also the well-known xkcd). The picture at the beginning was what it looked like when I came to survey the damage. The manager had effected some emergency repairs and installed a temporary keyed deadbolt, requiring me to go to the office to get inside.

And what do you do to attack disc locks? Well, if you're not handy with a pick, you drill them.

The drilled lock is on the right where you can see the small hole in the keyway. This lock was on the first unit, in which they upended several items and ended up stealing my Atari Portfolio in a camera bag (the good one, of course, not the flaky spare), a boxed set of Agenda VR3 PDAs (the famous MIPS Linux-based one), and an 867MHz Titanium PowerBook G4 in its original box. This unit was somewhat defective in that it has an iffy LCD CCFL that starts up pink. Later after submitting the claim and police report I also noticed they stole a box of Apple Pro Speakers (wait until they try to hook them up to anything).

For some reason they didn't drill the lock on the second unit and instead took several whacks at it with some sort of sharp instrument, but this only made the lock completely inoperable. They then pried the latch off, but the shelves in that unit interfere with the roll-up door unless you know the trick and they apparently weren't able to get inside. (The manager had also replaced the latch before I arrived.) In the process, however, they did succeed in knocking some items around including a couple of hard disks off the shelf from my Outbound laptop systems. They were fortunately backed up before storage and should be replaceable with some other 2.5" IDE equivalent device because they won't spin up now.

Having learned my lesson from the first burglary, I had nothing irreplaceable in the units, though I did have some items from my Tomy Pyuuta collection in the second one temporarily. They also didn't go through any boxes, likely because they didn't have any time: the next scheduled security patrol arrived about ten or fifteen minutes after they gained access and discovered the theft, so no doubt they hauldassed when they saw the guard coming back on rounds. I also wasn't the only person burglarized, though the manager wouldn't tell me exactly how many other units were hit. For the units that were hit, he provided us with covers that slide onto the latch:

I can see how this would make it very difficult to use boltcutters or an angle grinder on the lock shackle, but if you can get a key in it, you can get a wrench or a drill bit in it, so I'm not sure if it adds any meaningful security otherwise. I wandered around to see if the covers were on other units and I counted a few, though I couldn't say if everyone who got one was using it.

This time, same city, the police never showed for my units and I don't know if they came to the premises at all. (Before you ask, I have absolutely no idea if Proposition 47 has anything to do with it.) I submitted the police reports online and got my case numbers, one for each unit as usual, and then did an online submission with the insurance company including the photos that I had.

The insurance company took about a week to assign an adjuster. Despite having itemized the missing items twice on the police report and in the initial submission, I was asked to complete and notarize another inventory sheet for each unit on paper. The adjuster also wanted any proof of purchase or ownership, such as "a receipt, invoice, order or shipping confirmation, or debit/credit statement." Naturally, these items are so old and have been in there so long that none of this exists. The situation sounded suspiciously like I was going to get stiffed again and I complained to the adjuster that if I had to pay a notary to notarize two documents that may never result in a payout, I'd be out even more money as well as time. (A fairly cynical way of discouraging claims by people for whom that amount of money is more significant.)

To my surprise, although it took several E-mails and another ten days, the adjuster agreed to waive the notarization requirement. (I'm not even sure what the notarization step was accomplishing: the inventory sheets aren't affidavits.) The documents wanted purchase price and location, which I could only do from memory, and a replacement cost, which I did by eBay searches for comparable items. My insurance limit is $2,000 each unit with a $100 deductible, waived if you have a disc lock installed, which I did. I made sure the destroyed disc locks were listed as part of the claim and I determined a total replacement cost of $512.23 in the first unit and $57.23 in the second one.

I didn't hear anything for a month and E-mailed the adjuster again. The next day they paid off on the claim: $269.40 and $48.96. "The policy you have is based on the Actual Cash Value (ACV) of your items, which means depreciation needs to be applied to the item(s) based on their age. I've adjusted the loss presented and added in the applicable sales tax." Since I figured the alternative was $0 and extra vitriol for this blog post, I agreed. The checks arrived this week and we deposited them. They do not make me whole, though of course none of these items are critical.

Here's the lessons learned for those of us with classic computers in storage:

• The quality of the facility's security matters. The best burglary is the one that never happens. If one does, higher quality facilities are more likely to work with less unreasonable partner insurance agencies.

• Store nothing you really care about in a storage unit. Real burglars notwithstanding, the other kind of theft you may have to worry about is an unscrupulous manager who says you didn't pay your bill and auctions it off. Such horror stories aren't common, but I know people who say this has happened to them, keeping in mind I'm only hearing their side of the story. For example, my original Tomy Tutor, the actual computer I got when I was seven in its actual box with its actual accessories that actually still works, will never go in storage. Neither will my first suitcase Commodore KIM-1.

• Use a disc lock. They're certainly better than the cheapo padlocks you buy at the store, but most insurance companies will also reduce or waive your deductable if you have what they consider to be a proper lock, and that usually means a disc lock. If you use the disc lock the storage facility sells, you'll likely pay an additional markup on it, but it's also guaranteed to be acceptable to their partner insurance company. Plus, you can claim the replacement cost.

• How you do inventory may not have much effect on the success of your claim. The advice that you should take photos of your storage unit each time you're in it is a good one and you might as well do it if you have the presence of mind, but it's not really what they're asking for on claims ("you could have lost it, you could have misplaced it, that's not proof of ownership," etc.), and there's no guarantee you'll have photographed what in fact got taken. A beautiful spreadsheet doesn't prove ownership either. In both cases they wanted receipts and I didn't have any of those. In the first case, the insurance company told me to pound sand. In the second case, they paid off. I'll let you know if a pattern ever emerges, but the photos didn't have anything to do with it in either situation.

• Bulky and heavy items are ignored. Fortunately, many classic computing items are bulky and heavy, and they take up space in a truck. If it's going to slow them down and it's not clear they can fence it, they might damage it but they probably won't take it. By the way, claim damaged items too, not just stolen ones. You might as well ask.

• Something neat-looking that's light and portable might get nicked. The Portfolio was in a camera bag, so they probably figured it was a camera and yoinked it. Moreover, anything with an Apple logo that's light and portable will get nicked. These aren't usually technologically savvy people and they know that Apple makes this cool thing called an iPhone and some watch thing and people like those. So they took the PowerBook and Pro Speakers, even though they probably didn't fetch much when they tried to sell them.

• Conversely, if you make the thieves' job harder, they'll take less. Gangs that hit self-storage units aren't generally the ones that do a whole lot of preplanning and research. Other than maybe renting a unit themselves to look around and get a gate code, they usually won't know the exact interior layout or what units are occupied, and since they won't know what time window they have before any guards or staff come around they'll prefer to grab what's obvious. In my case, the door on the second unit won't fully open without a bit of particular fiddling, so they obviously gave up. Messy units are harder to work in but also harder to steal from. Put high value items in the back and out of view behind big heavy ones. Hide production packaging in non-descript boxes: they didn't get any of my Palm Pilot collection, for example, despite being small, portable, frequently in their original boxes and looking like something of value, because they were all in plain cardboard boxes with opaque descriptions in Sharpie marker. But they got the Agenda VR3 box because it was out on the shelf.

• You don't get what you don't ask for, and you won't get what you don't constantly get on their case about. The adjuster was clearly not a malignant person, just overworked, because this is a cut-rate insurance company who tries to screw their employees just as much as their covered individuals. The squeaky wheel gets the check.

• You will never get the full replacement value of your items. Ever. In the end, it's just stuff. I'm not happy it got broken into, but I'm not going to shrivel up or shoot myself in the head over it either. Nothing was in there I can't live without.

Since the break-in occurred, the temporary deadbolt was replaced with a new cipher lock, but this one controls a full deadbolt, not just a door latch. The facility is also gradually converting the roll-up doors to pick-resistant cylinder locks and dispensing with padlocks altogether. I'm hopeful I won't be writing a third blog post on this topic in a few years.