Brought the boat up to dad’s house in Soap Lake to store it temporarily with the travel trailer until I have a suitable location to park them both. Noticed that something was amiss when I looked at the travel trailer…

Battery cover was on the ground.

Hmm… strap was cut (you can just un-lash it), cables were cut (poorly), battery missing.

$125 battery, maybe $20 worth of cables. I should probably notify the police department. Wouldn’t expect them to do anything other than log the occurrence.

Soooo… let’s find the local non-emergency number for Soap Lake PD…

Its Google page link results in a 404.

Maybe the link I had available is outdated. (Strike 1)

I’ll just go to the city’s page then drill down from there.

Well, that’s additionally unexpected — it returns a default ‘bluehost’ unprovisioned page. Means that the hosting provider isn’t presenting a page or its DNS is misconfigured.

No idea how long its been that way. (Strike 2)

Okay, let’s just search again on Google for the “Soak Lake Police Department non-emergency number”. I prepare myself to simply say, “Hey, I know you guys are super busy, but I’d like to just report a petty theft so it can be logged.” Right, that’ll do.

Let’s give it a shot… **dial, dial, dial…** Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, “Goodbye.” **click** (Strike 3)

Uh… did its computer just hang up on me?

It wasn’t long ago that I’d commented that somebody had included on their receipts a number to dial for complaints/feedback. But the number that was included was a non-number (000-000-0000 goes nowhere except “the operator”). Perhaps Soap Lake has caught on and simply routed their calls to /dev/null to save themselves the troubles.

“We’ve had no calls? Really? Wow, we must be doing absolutely amazing out there…”

—

Update: went out hunting near Wilson Creek the following morning and was able to reach them upon our return.