Fortunately, a few days later, a foundry man was offered the sword. He bought it, not to melt at his foundry, but to patriotically return to be put back where it belonged in Bolivar's hand.
When I had my printing plant from the 1960s through the 1980s; it was very common for employees to steal from their co-workers the meat from their meal-time sandwiches leaving just the two slices of bread. Non-meat sandwiches also lost their fillings. Hard boiled eggs frequently disappeared. Wigs were occasionally stolen from the girls who took them to wear after payday on Fridays.
In the 1970s my plant was still doing its typesetting on linotypes and we used plenty of lead. We found that on several occasions we had been robbed of considerable amounts of the metal. How did they do it? Simple. It was placed in the bottom of the garbage cans, and when these were taken out, the truck driver would later separate from the waste paper and sell the metal to other printing plants that had linotypes.
Thefts can be of all sizes-small or large. Such is the case of the 10 miles of electric cables and hundreds of rails stolen from the government railroad line. Also, the many computers containing valuable information that were stolen from state hospitals. In city parks, iron benches, lamps and lamp posts are stolen mainly to sell to foundries. Jewellery from a few buried bodies in some cemeteries is the target of some night Thieves. Thus, as you can see, you're not save even after death.
Thieves Can Be Creative in Their Intrusions
I can go on and on. The list is endless. This shows that thieves exercise great ingenuity in discovering new ways of getting their hands on others' properties. The subject is a universal one. In Costa Rica we take it calmly, keep alert and take simple precautions to cut down on opportunities for stealing from you.
At this point I'll mention an incident which was really no theft at all but which occurred to my uncle Claudio Gallardo in 1985. He owned an old, small woodhouse along the nice beachfront Paseo de los Turistas in the city of Puntarenas. It was one of two similar houses that laid side by side. Every month or two Claudio and his wife, aunt Dora, would take the train from San José to see how the place was and perhaps stay there a day or two visiting friends and taking time for a dip in the ocean. On one of their trips, and to their great surprise, they found no house at all. It seems the neighbour had begun to build a new house, and the constructor, thinking the houses were a single property, went ahead and demolished both. To avoid a long fight and taking the incident to court, Claudio sold the lot at a good profit to his neighbour and fortunately everyone came out of the deal well satisfied. No bloodshed was necessary.
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