Car window smash and grab @ Lyneham Indoor Sports Centre

“For your new phone, definately look into the options on automatically storing your photos into some sort of a cloud photo storage service – iCloud, Google etc.”

Thanks Jamie, we are definitely doing this on the weekend. It was always on the “To Do” list, now it’s on the “Must Do” list.

Another lesson learnt would be to read the policy documents when you get them and check they do in fact meet your needs.

If it was just a “stupid oversight” why would you give your husband the “wrath of angy wifeliness” . No point getting up him if it was just his crappy tracksuit pants that let him down…

And – now, as well as angry and anxious, you can get smart.

Ellebana said :

As I said in the post, we never KNOWINGLY leave our phones in parked cars. We have previously had our house robbed and car stolen, so we are very security conscious. It was just our dumb luck that hubby was wearing new trackies made out of lightweight fabric (which we now know to have useless, slippery pockets). He didn’t feel the phone fall out of his pocket and it was dark and rainy when he parked the car, so he didn’t see it.

I’m very security concious also but despite this have done exactly the same thing and had my phone fall out of my pocket and accidentally left in the car. It’s so easily done and just really bad luck for you it happened while there was a crime spree going on. For your new phone, definately look into the options on automatically storing your photos into some sort of a cloud photo storage service – iCloud, Google etc. Any data stored on a smart phone is at high risk of loss, so must be backed up regularly.

As I said in the post, we never KNOWINGLY leave our phones in parked cars. We have previously had our house robbed and car stolen, so we are very security conscious. It was just our dumb luck that hubby was wearing new trackies made out of lightweight fabric (which we now know to have useless, slippery pockets). He didn’t feel the phone fall out of his pocket and it was dark and rainy when he parked the car, so he didn’t see it. He was running late for the game and assumed that he must have left his phone at home, so he didn’t think twice about it until he came out and saw the car window broken. Believe me, he has felt that wrath of angry wifeliness over this stupid oversight.

Apparently other cars were broken into at Lyneham last night, both at the cricket and netball centres; plus outside a gym elsewhere in Canberra.

With regard to our insurance – the phone definitely isn’t covered as car contents. I’m going to have a good look at the fine print of our house contents policy, because I certainly wasn’t aware that goods had to be listed individually to be covered by “portables” insurance. I’m still angry that when I specifically purchased this policy in the first place from NRMA I was not told that I needed to itemise things. We had previously been insured with Comminsure and they were so disgraceful with our house and car theft claims that we went to NRMA because they seemed to be better. We seem to always be getting caught out by the fine print with our claims, and the whole claiming process becomes just as stressful as the thefts themselves.

To their credit, NRMA have been excellent with the broken window claim (O’Brien’s are fixing it for us today), and they were also very good when our neighbour reversed into the car last year. Plus we came to NRMA because their home contents policy was much better than Comminsure’s. But as for NRMA Landlord’s Insurance – don’t get me started about how disgusted I am with that rip-off. If you are a landlord… run, don’t walk, away from NRMA insurance.

So I guess there are lots of lessons to be learned from all this, which was one of the reasons I decided to post our story here. Interestingly I came to Canberra from Sydney a few years ago, and had only ever made two insurance claims in my life (rear-ended both times). Since arriving in Canberra we have been robbed three times. Makes me both angry and anxious.

Can I just add that in the future you should keep your photos stored elsewhere. Sign up for Goggle+, you don’t have to use it for anyhting but the mobile app will automatically upload photos as you take them. You can also look at something like dropbox.

My personal choice is Flickr as that is what I use to store all my photos online as I have lost many in the past when a laptop failed between backups. It also means my family can access the photos anytime they want to.

vet111 said :

Worth asking the question about whether it might be covered under your car’s insurance policy – some offer coverage of contents within the car, including electronics….

Yep worth trying, although they’re often limited to $500 total. Still, that’s better than nothing.

I am in the middle of a car repair claim with NRMA (not at fault) and it’s been going smoothly so far. I was considering getting a quote from them for home/contents insurance, but perhaps not.

Worth asking the question about whether it might be covered under your car’s insurance policy – some offer coverage of contents within the car, including electronics….

Sorry to hear about losing the phone and the photos. Sounds like you’re smart and never leave valuables in the car but got unlucky on this occassion. Also your issues with NRMA don’t suprise me. I had to claim twice with them, neither incidents my fault as they were related to theft. On both occassions, NRMA tried their best to delay paying on the claims by not phoning me back, making me chase them up with countless phone calls. When I didn’t give up, they then eventually paid the claims. In both claims they underpaid and I had to chase up the full amount. In one of the claims, the car was insured for an agreed value and was written off. The claim paid was $500 under the agreed value on my policy, then I had to battle with them to pay the full amount. After alot of hassle the $500 was eventually paid up and they blamed “computer errors”. The claim process with NRMA was more stressful than the damage the criminals did. Then I bought my new car and a year later they jacked up the premiums and wouldn’t explain why. All this after 20 years of not making a claim.

With the data loss, it’s a shame you lost photos but this could have also happened many other ways so make sure to backup any important data stored on any computer, especially a portable device. These days people are putting huge amounts of data onto smart phones and it’s a risky thing. With the iPhone and IOS5, you can setup iCloud to do this automatically for your photos for thirty days. Then every 30 days, you can copy all photos/data onto a computer. Then get a large portable hard drive, backup the data on the computer and keep in a safe place, preferrably in a different physical location. Then if there’s a catastrophe then your data is safe and all you’ve lost is some money.

“We NEVER leave our phones in parked cars anywhere,”

Well, I guess you did. But mongrels are everywhere.

tidalik said :

Oh, and indoor cricket is a terrible sport. 🙂

Yes, you can really see its disadvantages on a rainy day like today…