Serial Nos

What a great gig! You've played your tail off and you're on top of the world.  People are giving you compliments that would make a narcissistic ego maniacal crazy clown blush.... You hang at the club afterwards with close friends.  Eventually the lights come up and you know it's that time... It's Jackson Browne time.

And as you load out you're simultaneously avoiding the reality of the impending not load in... Out of your vehicle.. Several trips up stairs.. Bringing your precious gear safely home. 

But it's 4am and you're spent.  You chuck a blanket over your  gear in a weak attempt to disguise things and you crash inside your place.

You wake up what feels like days later after your  mini hibernation/rejuvenation and after much coffee or in search of coffee you make your way to your vehicle to find your worst nightmare .... Smashed glass and a painfully obvious lack of the aforementioned precious gear.

After you finish vomiting repeatedly in your mouth for several minutes or hours and you sip on a cold glass of water to prevent dehydration from the shameless ugly face crying you were doing on the street explaining to strangers in some foreign sob induced linguistic abomination of sentence fragments.. You think..... Ok.... How do I get my gear back?

Step #1 - what are the serial numbers of all the precious items of gear?

At this point you either definitively know the answer to the above question or you're thinking..... "Serial numbers?? Hmmm.. I've never considered keeping track of them"

If you're the former, you probably already know the exact steps you'd follow to get your babies back.  Relax and enjoy the show.

If you're the latter, you're probably thinking .. "right... How WOULD I prove to a pawn shop that the instrument they just bought from the devil is actually mine?!?!"  - you, my friend, have work to do.

Your knee pits are probably sweating a bit too.  Go ahead and check.  It's ok.

So what I used to do is have a piece of paper with my serial numbers written down and stored somewhere safe.  I know... Paper.. How cute is that?!

Today I use Google Drive where I have a folder containing detailed digital pics of all my gear and then a folder of pictures of the serial number of each piece of gear I own.

Google Drive for Android

It's a simple cost free solution that could save you great cost (and bodily fluids)  in the future if you're able to present definitive proof that the gear that was being pawned by the sweaty guy in the hoodie with the shakes that wanted to sell his "4 string guitar" is actually rightfully yours.

If my gear eve gets stolen you're going to see so many annoying posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Flickr, Instagram, CNN, CBC, Infoseek, excitebike, Tomb Raider, movie previews, church bulletins, medical records, etc, etc and they'll all be full of pics detailing every inch of my instruments and their lovely serial numbers. Anyone buying a used instrument who does a simple Google search will see all 6945 of my posts and the swat team would be there in minutes.

Now picture Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order walking across the parking lot, over to you with your Mono Case on her back, inside your precious instrument, saying "those serial numbers were what allowed us to crack this case".

Score!