TOOK THE TYPEWRITER.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 November 1919, Page 3

TOOK THE TYPEWRITER.

If anyone had been asked what was the least likely thing, to be stoU'n ironi ! ■au office, after the safe, he would unhesitatingly say the typewriter—that is, if lie had been asked after the biginr.iiig of last week. Since then three Arms were deprived of this useful adjunct in a manner that almost suggest* necromancy (says the Auckland Star). In one instance the thief had to ;;o into an office where there were several people —not actually in the room where tfie typwriter was, but near enough to cause trepidation in anyone but a consummate .artist in the art of abstraction, or some. one mentally deranged—walk round a counter, pick up the machine, and walk out of the building, down Shortland Street in broad daylight. The typist was not out of the room more than five minutes.

In another case, right at the top of one of the highest buildings in yueen Street, the machine was taken while the clerk was at lunch. Machine, bovit, and all went in this case. The man who organised the Shortland Street raid was gotd enough to leave the cover. Of course, once a man got outside tin oflice with the machine under his arm there would not be a great deal of difficulty in getting clear, as it is very cjnimoif for a youth to be seen carrying a typewriter to be mended, and anyone might easily pass half-a-dozen people in a building where there was a suite of olEces without exciting suspicion. In ■future, however, it will not be surprising if anyone carrying a typewriter should be accosted and asked to explain.

As the thefts have occurred so dose together in point of time it suggests that they arc the work of one man, and people in offices would be wise to either find some means of ranking their typewriters a fixture to something too weighty to tuck under the arm, or take other nfeans of guarding them. Typewriters are costly things nowadays, It would seem an easy tiling to trace a machine, as.each one has its own number, but people who ought to know think it is likely that the individual who appropriated these missing machines has them out of the Dominion by now.