On Saturday, as I was biking home from work, I found an ipod lying in the road. It was right beside a parked car, and it seemed reasonable that it fell out of the driver’s pocket, so I wrote a quick yet somewhat vague note on my business card and tucked it under the windshield wiper. Went back to that spot later in the day and the car was gone.
I’ve yet to hear from anyone.
Going through the ipod’s contact list and the ‘about’ section, I came across a name that doesn’t appear in any phone book. I tried googling the name to no avail.
There’s an engraving on the back of the ipod, but it’s pretty useless, since it’s not a real name.
A couple people have posted ‘lost ipod’ notices on New York’s Craigslist, but none of the notices matches what I found.
Does anybody think I should do anything else? Or can I go ahead and claim this as mine now? (All I need is the right connection cable and I’ll have a nice backup to my own ipod.)
Is there a store there, or some kind of office, or is it just a residential area?
You may want to write a notice to post around there, saying “found your (engraving on the back)”, since the owner would know it’s an ipod and be able to give you a reasonable list of the stuff in it.
If nobody answers after a week, or if you decide that putting up signs with contact info is too much trouble/scary, just keep it.
In similar cases, I’d tell the local police about it. They might ask you to bring it in, but just as often you’d be allowed to keep it until someone claims it through the police, which may be never.
Sounds like you have done enough. I would wait about a week and keep looking in the “lost ipod” notices on the New York’s Craigslist. After that, you just scored an Ipod!
It seems to me you did enough. Here, at this point, I would bring it to the nearest police station, but I don’t know if police stations take lost items in the USA.
If it’s something where I can contact the owner easily (e.g. a wallet) then I’ll call the owner and get him to pick it up from my office. Otherwise I just take the item to the local police station. I hand it in there and let the police do the rest.
In Manhattan I’m loathe to put up posters with a contact number saying “I found your ipod.”
Likewise, the NYPD will take lost items, and put them up for auction at www.stealitback.com if they can’t locate the owner. But having talked to colleagues who were the victim of theft/loss, the NYPD won’t do very much to reunite lost items with people. Bureaucrats can’t be bothered…
But the lost ipod site looks nifty. I’ll check it out.
Dammit! Just as I start browsing for ipod - USB cables, the owner calls me! He’s leaving the country for a week though, so maybe I can pretend it got stolen in the interim
