I lost my purse on a bus when I was like, ten. There was, unsurprisingly, nothing of value in it.
I forgot my really nice, ridiculously expensive umbrella in an autorickshaw in Hyderabad, India last summer. I’m still mad about it. (Possibly because I hate autorickshaw drivers on principle and it angers me that one of them has my umbrella now.) I knew at the time that I shouldn’t have bought a $24 umbrella, but it was all they had at Target at the moment and it was raining at the time and I actually needed it.
ETA: This was so horrible I think I tried to repress it. I once left my passport on a plane, in the seat pocket. It was the last leg of a very very long journey and I was pretty out of it, I guess.
I deliberately left my old slightly broken SatNav in a Hertz rental car this New Year. I didn’t want it any more, and I thought someone else might be delighted to “find” it.
It arrived in the mail yesterday. :smack:
(Good customer service though. No charge, either.)
Not something I left, but Tuesday morning on my way to work I saw that someone had dropped a little plastic baggie of weed on the floor beneath the seat in front of me. Someone’s gonna be disappointed.
When I was in college I left a brand new leather coat on the bus. Needless to say I did not have money to buy another one. The next day I was riding the same bus and someone handed me my coat. “I see you on the bus every day, and noticed you left your coat behind, so I brought it with me for you.”
I’ve left scarves and umbrellas on the MTA buses and trains before. The last thing I lost on a train was my wallet, on the way to Anime Los Angeles a couple weeks ago. It had my California ID, ATM card, Starbucks card and $1.00. I realized it was gone almost as soon as I made my way down from the train platform to the busway to go to the hotel where the con was taking place. I called the emergency number, but they couldn’t find it. So I took the train home in the other direction, called the bank to cancel my ATM card, went to the bank branch to take cash out, and resigned myself to missing day 2 of the con. On Monday, I came home from work to find someone had mailed me my California ID and ATM card, along with a Jehovah’s Witness tract that was not in my wallet when I lost it.
An umbrella here and there. The last thing was a couple of years ago. I somehow left my rent check on the bus. I planned to mail it as soon as I got off the bus, and I think I even thought I did because it wasn’t until a couple of days later that I realized I never did actually mail it and that I had put it down on the seat next to me while I looked for something in my bag. I called my rental company to tell them what happened and that I’d be a few days late while I canceled the check and mailed them a new one, when the bookkeeper said it was OK, they had just processed my payment.
Someone had found the envelope and mailed it!
Not even a couple of weeks later, I found some envelopes on the sidewalk on a windy day - someone’s bills - must have dropped them or fallen out of a pocket. I mailed those, too. What comes around goes around!
I’m a bugger for losing things. I’ve lost purses, buspasses, hats, gloves… the biggest thing was a kitchen stool, a prop for a play, which I got back by waiting at the stop across the road for the bus to come back from the terminus. I’ve got back a few bags of shopping that way too. The one that’s really pissing me off at the moment is a library book, I really hoped someone would have handed that in to the driver or dropped it back at the nearest library. The one that brings a smile was just this week when I dropped my purse whilst struggling to a seat on a bus full of schoolkids and one of them handed it back before I’d noticed it was missing.
Thanks for all the stories, and I was expecting to get a lot more “how could you be so stupid?” type responses. But it’s a thing I don’t normally carry around, and I ride the train almost every day. It was automatic to just get up and walk out.
I won’t find out if Lost and Found has it until tomorrow. They’re close on the weekends.
I was reading an article about a company that buys up all the items that turn up in lost and found departments and never get claimed and then resells them. One of the unusual things they had sold was a suit of armor.
Now I can see forgetting a book or an umbrella or a cellphone on a bus or an airplane. But how the hell do you leave a suit of armor behind? You’d think its presence would have dominated the whole trip.
Or at the very least, you’d think the person who forgot it would have followed up and called lost and found the next day.
Not all that valuable, but still really annoying: A Widespread Panic concert T-Shirt.
I bought it before the show b/c I was afraid they’d sell out, and b/c you don’t have much time to get across the Bay after a show ends at the Greek Ampitheater in Berkeley.
I then carried the damn thing around with me all night, walked it all the way down the hill from the Greek, onto BART, switched BART trains @ Lake Merritt, across the Bay, onto the 6 Parnassus, all the way to our stop near UCSF…then I left it on the seat.
As the bus pulled away and I was bitching about it, my wife helpfully said “Why didn’t you just wear it?” :smack:
I remember I left a big case of CDs on the El train.
The worst part is they were like Juice Newton, Danielle Brisebois, Sheena Easton and a lot of Japanese version CDs of female singers. It would’ve fetched over $500 on eBay, which is what it pretty much cost me to replace it and some I couldn’t never replace.
The saddes part is, I just know whoever found it picked it up and said “Wow what a bunch of lame music and threw it in the trash.”
I wouldn’t mind so much if someone at least got some use out of it.
I also leave about 10 hats and 10 scarves and 10 pairs of gloves on the Chicago Public Transit, each year. I hope "finders’ of such things like them
