Lost and Found

I'm missing a cell phone. This was my fault, really. I was using the facilities, and having little else to do, I was playing with the phone as a distraction. There's a little shelf in the stall I was at, so I put it there. I usually tell myself "make sure to pick that up afterwards", and yet somehow I didn't. Sad.

Unfortunately, the cell phone is so light, I didn't know I wasn't carrying it until much later, like 6 hours later. As this was a men's room in a business setting, there are others who are likely to use it, and then realize "hmm, someone left a cell phone". To that person's credit, there appears to be little attempt to abuse the phone.

Unfortunately, there's no standard protocol for returning a lost item. A building is unlikely to have a lost-and-found. I used to work at a university, and if you lost something, that was probably it. With no centralized lost-and-found, there's no way to find anything conveniently.

At a university, there should be one central lost and found, and several smaller lost and found sites. It should be convenient for a person who finds something to walk to the site, report the information, and have it properly registered. The key is having it properly registered, because places can "lose" something that they clearly have, due to poor bookkeeping.

Ah, I've now picked this blog entry much after I wrote it, so I have to explain what happened since then. I started this entry on June 30, one day before leaving on vacation, and resume it on July 10, three days after returning.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this tale, I lost a cell phone. I thought I lost in a men's room. I did not.

For you see, that day, it rained. And rained. And rained. It was, as the idiom goes, raining cats and dogs. I lacked an umbrella, and had little desire to be wetter than I already was. So I sprinted to my car. And still I got wet. Once I arrived there, I noticed my phone was missing.

The following day, I talked to a friend of mine. It turns out that the man who picked up my phone had been making phone calls. I figured he was calling some friend of his, perhaps a spouse. Once I found the number he dialed and dialed it myself, it was....the place I bought my bicycle. Ah, that makes more sense. He was using my history to find someone he could call and leave a message. He called two friends, but only left one message. Fortunately, I got that number, contacted him, and he told me the tale of how he found my phone.

I had thought, however, he'd work in my building. Alas, he was simply visiting the bank, and did not live anywhere nearby. He dropped by the following day, but I wasn't sure he'd actually do this, so I had to get a new phone (and since he told me he found the phone in the rain, I wasn't sure the phone was in good condition) since I was planning to go on a trip the following day (ie, the day he'd return the phone).

But, I digress. Really, we need a better way to handle lost and found items, and yet, there's often little organization when it comes to this. It often means that when something is lost, it's lost. Even when there's a good samaritan who finds what you want, they can leave it with someone, and the odds you get it back are slim, unless the lost and found makes some effort to find you, which they rarely do. In fact, the person who finds it often is the best person to deal with it since they have already made that first step to locate the owner. Lost and found simply does a job. They don't care to return the object since they have no idea how to return the object.

For example, suppose I lose something at a gym. Suppose the gym keeps track of who's been in the gym and when. In principle, they could inform everyone over a time range that a certain item was lost, and were they missing it or not. They could, but they probably won't. Too much work. Let the person who lost it figure it out.

So, the story has a happy ending. I was able to get my phone back. He didn't have to bring it back. I didn't particularly need it back either, but he brought it back, and so I did the best I could do that would involve the least effort on my part, and likely make him happy. I gave the nice gentleman some money for his trouble. He didn't have to call and leave a message. And yet he did.

While I wish to blame cell phone manufacturers for making poor phone accessories, which, were there better ones, this problem would have been completely avoided, or were there simply better ways to deal with lost items. And yet, we live in the world we live in, and occasionally, someone in that world still cares, still believes posessions, such as they are, are meaningful to the possessor (if possessions were meaningless, then I would not care, and that too would solve my problem), and make the extra effort to return it.

I can't help but admire that.