The Malaysian Job

Dramatic, albeit culturally inaccurate, reenactment

I been robbed.

No sword-toting-triads cornered me in an alley in some kind of vendetta-based street fight. No stealthy street urchin picked 'part my pocket whilst I was distracted by fireworks at a harvest festival. No drugged out thug snagged the camera from my hand as he was jonesing from opium withdrawal. Nope, nothing quite so dramatic. Instead, I get robbed by a security guard at the hotel where my bags were stored in the locked, CCTV monitored bag check room that was theoretically the safest possible place for my stuff to be. WTF, universe!

For my trip 'round Malaysia, my good buddy Shwa and I decided to store the majority of our baggage (emotional and otherwise) in a luggage room at the first hotel we were at in Kuala Lumpur. In theory, a genius play on our parts, as we drilled down to having one bag each with just enough in it to survive. Or, in Shwa's case, just enough tshirts to always have them smell funky. After carefully picking out which knock-off Eastern Mountain Sports bags we wanted to purchase from the shady street vendor, we set out prepared well for the rigors of life on the road in the Orient. By this of course, I mean we had gym shorts and cough syrup and stayed at hotels nicer than my apartment in NYC, but we were goddam well prepared for it, for certain.

A couple of sunny weeks spent at the beach later, we returned to KL to collect our gear at just after midnight only discover that from my pack had been pilfered my brand spanking new macbook pro and my precious, precious iphone. As any iphone owner knows, life without your iphone is dull and meaningless, so this incident sparked in me a rage and despair more typically experienced by Greek gods and jazz musicians. But I kept it all in check...remarkably well, I might add. Instead of flipping shit I went on total emotional lock-down and marched down to the front desk to demand either blood or the return of my vitally important electronics. I didn't care which at the time. After meeting with the security guard, I was assured that he would look through CCTV tape and see what he could find out, then we would proceed from there, but things didn't look good. Shwa wisely added the line "if the laptop just happens to show up somewhere, we'll be happy about that and probably won't have to file any complaints, ya dig?" This indicated that even if jackass mc-guardface knew something about it, we'd probably not have to box his ears so long as I got my laptop back.

After about twenty minutes we got a call. "We think there is a laptop that was found in the housekeeping pantry. It might be yours." Instead of screaming "SO BRING IT THE F UP HERE YOU MORON" I said, "OK, please bring it by and I will confirm whether or not it is my computer." Frantic pacing ensued, relieved only thereafter by the ominous knock on the door and presentation of a laundry bag containing a computer. I sat cross-legged on the hallway carpeting and tore through the bag to reveal a macbook pro. My macbook pro. Joy washed over me in crashing waves but my dead-inside approach to dealing with stress left me feeling no relief. But even steel-for-a-heart Eric is not invincible, so for effect let's say that a single tear rolled down my cheek and splashed victoriously on the keyboard.

Happy about not losing my entire digital life to nothingness, I tried to sign online to warn ATT that the precious was still on the lam, but instead found a few souvenirs left behind by the culprit on my desktop. Intrigued, I clicked through to learn more about my technophilic picklock only in shock to discover a picture of the security guard himself! How could this possibly get any weirder, I thought to myself.

Then, it got a whole lot weirder. Now, I'm sure you've heard that seeing is believing. But this is a family restaurant so I can't feasibly show you what I discovered next without having to change my page access to 18+, so let my thousand words paint you a picture. A shaky handycam pans across what appears to me the landscape of a man and woman in the throws of passion, quickly catching only a glimpse of our sticky-fingered lothario atop his lady friend, in flagrante delicto. The picture is grainy and the sequence of actions jumbled enough to make me wonder how he pulled off a "let's switch so that I'm on top" maneuver without dropping the video camera, but there is no doubt in the world that this jackass made a sex tape and put it on my desktop. This alone was nearly enough for me to forgive the whole ordeal, but frankly the eight seconds of blurry video wouldn't even hold the interest of the most tactless and desperate thirteen-year-old who just discovered auto-erotica, so I filed a police report and tried to get the guy arrested.

Things I have learned from these events. One - I am too trusting. I immediately thought there was no way that security guard could be the culprit until I saw him sex-taping his ladyfriend, and I doubt I'll get that much evidence to adjudge future potential transgressors. Two - I think my iphone days might be over. I won't be buying a brand new iphone, thanks in part to having no job or income, until at least April and even then my contracts up just a short time later. Dare I go droid? Three - Malaysian women have yet to discover the joys and pains of proper waxing techniques. This was more of a pet interest than a life lesson, but still I felt like sharing.

And four - getting robbed sucks. It's demoralizing and you feel helpless. Even with the cops involved, there's no way in hell I'm getting my iphone back, and its a bloody miracle I even got the laptop back (big ups to g slash d on that one). I'm happy I was able to comport myself with as much reserve as I did throughout the affair, but it comes as little comfort to know that some asshole is using my phone to make sex tapes of him and his girlfriend while I'm left with a 6 year old Nokia to get me through. On the other hand, it's uplifting to know that even in a predominantly Muslim country, people still like making sex tapes. Perhaps the real crime here was not making it a good one.