Dear Thief,

Posted around the neighborhood for the past few weeks has been this wonderful gem of a note:

Dear Thief,

When you broke into my home Friday and stole my laptop computer, you stole not just a piece of electronic gear.  You stole hundreds of hours of my work held in the files on it.  I am asking for you to return my laptop, and more importantly, to give me back my work.

I imagine to you this laptop is just a source of some quick cash by selling it, or a toy to play DVDs, surf the internet, or email your pals.  To me it's a tool for work and a reservoir of my efforts.  I am a radio producer.  There are hours of irreplaceable audio recordings that I was editing into radio pieces; stories about activists and community members, stories about immigration and about the environment.  The laptop holds letters, research documents, project histories, contact information.  Some of these documents cannot be recreated at all and some cannot be recreated without a great effort.  The computer will be hard and expensive for me to replace, but all the work on it is the real valuable part to me.  This is the greater loss to me.  You stole a treasure that is worthless to you

You know the house where this silver Toshiba Satellite M45 came from.  Please bring it back.  You did a very bad thing to come into my home and steal.  Please make it right.  You can leave it on the front porch.

PARENTS,
If your son has recently acquired a laptop he does not have the personal resources to buy for himself, please help him to learn to do the right thing.  Please help him to return my laptop, and repair this loss.

I dutifully sat at a corner and read the entire thing (and, I have to admit, I took one of them down so I could transcribe it here.  Sorry 'bout that).

This entire message is great.  I can only imagine how cathartic it was to write this.  I wonder if it actually worked?  It'd be a great end to the story if the poster actually managed to get the laptop back.