I think I might have read this in The Gift of Fear, currently being discussed in another thread, but if not, it still seems like good advice - if you need help and you can’t get an authority like a cop or something, approach somebody and ask them. (A woman with children is often suggested, I think.) The reason being, if you approach them the chances of them being the Green River Killer are vanishingly small. People who approach you may have ulterior motives.
People are always asking me to watch their laptop or whatever while they go to the bathroom (I’m a librarian.) “Well, we can’t be responsible for your personal items.” “That’s okay!” and they leave it! (Hell, half of them just leave their laptops without even asking anybody to look after them!) Stuff gets stolen here all the time - it’s a downtown public library! People is dumb.
The psychological phenomena have been expanded on, but I think one that helps as well is the same phenomenon where they tell you, if you should arrive at the scene of an emergency, never to just yell “Somebody call 911!” Instead, you should point at some random person and go “You! I need you to call 911! Will you do that?”
If someone specific is given a responsibility by a person, s/he is more likely to take appropriate action than if they are given that responsibility implicitly as part of a group (in this case, the responsibility of ensuring that nothing befalls a stranger’s luggage).
The flip side of that is some people will use that to manipulate or impose on others. And if person A doesn’t want the inconvenience of taking care of their own stuff, how on earth can A think it’s okay to inconvenience person B?
Outside of actual need, I try to follow Thomas Jefferson’s dictum, “Never trouble another for what you can do yourself”, and I expect others to try to do the same.
Once, in Union Station in Washington, I had a little extra time before my train to New York left, so I got some falafel and tabouleh and sat down against a wall to scarf. Out of nowhere, a young lady came up to me and said, “Can you watch my luggage for a few minutes? I have to go make a phone call.” (Cell phones were unusual then.) My mouth full, I just nodded, and then noticed she had a LOT of stuff! She ran off, and I parked myself between these two BIG stacks of expensive, new, designer, matching suitcases. To finish eating.
After a while, I was almost done, and it was getting close to when I needed to get to the platform, and this girl wasn’t back yet. This made me nervous; it would be doing her real injury if any misfortune was to happen to what looked to be pricey things, but I DO have a train to catch!
Happily, she showed up in time, and off we went our separate ways. It is a real mystery why she chose a long-haired hippie like me as the most trustworthy person in sight.
I am frequently asked at airports to watch people’s things. I will do so as long as it it not within half an hour of the flight, as one time I almost missed boarding due to waiting to watch someone’s bag when they vanished. Eventually, I directed a Delta employee’s attention to it, and said “that’s an unattended bag.”
“So?” was her response.
“Well, for the last 4 hours I’ve been in the airport, I’ve been listening to a looped tape saying ‘all unattended bags must be immediately turned into the nearest airline representative.’ Someone asked me to watch their bag and they’ve been gone for nearly an hour.”
“So why are you telling us now?”
“Because I’m about to board your plane which is already 2 hours late, and I don’t want to miss the flight and sleep in a garbage bin overnight before you can book me on the next flight.”
“So what do you want us to do with the bag?”
At this point, I could have been really abrasive, but I had thoughts of “piss off a clearly stupid unskilled person with a power trip, and I’ll miss the flight and probably get on the no-fly list as a potential terrorist” and I just shrugged and walked to the boarding line.
Which is basically why it used to be very common pre-9/11 but I haven’t encountered it since. The few times I’ve seen someone ask post-9/11 they got a straight refusal, ranging from “hell NO” to “and how do I know you don’t have anything funny in there?”
Given the ratio of bathroom-stall-space to luggage-one-encounters-in-airports-and-big-train-stations, sometimes it simply was the best solution.
Where in California are you? If you are in the Bay Area, you may be running into a lot more people who don’t have cars and thus don’t have a place to lock their stuff up when they need to deal with stuff and can’t lug it all around. I do some solo travel and I try not to have too much stuff, but there have been some times when I’ve thought my stuff would be safer in the hands of a stranger than on my back on a strange city street with my mind occupied by something else (like a phone call or whatever.)