I'm not sure if I'm more prone to losing things or less prone than the average person, but I do have a bad habit of having things fall out of my pocket. For guys, I think the pockets are very important because we don't carry handbags or purses; our entire lives are basically in our pockets at all times: phone, wallet, keys. So those pockets better be built like Fort Knox: durable, unable to be penetrated, and not allowing anything to leave its jurisdiction. Unfortunately, the pants/shorts I wear often are not like that. I actually have some pants with holes in the pocket area, which is a disaster waiting to happen. Some pockets are too lose so that when I sit down and move my legs like to cross them angle my body in a certain way, items fall out. So far I haven't been pickpocketed yet (that I know of).
When I do inevitably drop something, I have to retrace my steps and go back to the scene of the mishap and try to recover the item, which today were my headphones (Yes, it happened again today! On a cold February day with the sun going down with the hopes of ever finding my brand new Bose headphone carrying case that MJ got me for Christmas because she's thoughtful about buying me gifts but also because there's so many things I need but don't bother to buy or try to "tough it out" and go without.) I was filled with a mixture of self-loathing, defeat, frustration, deja vu, and just feeling cold. The losing stuff is very similar to getting angry and raising my voice: everything time it happens I berate myself to make sure it doesn't happen again, and because it's fresh in mind I'm very careful not to for a few days, even weeks, but then after the routine settles in I forget and it rears its ugly head all over again unexectedly and without warning; the cycle repeats.
America has a thoughtful system of Lost and Found that is like panacea for people like me, or at least a Get Out of Jail Free card. Usually someone who finds a discarded item will pick it up and give it to the nearest facility or building manager, but where does one turn it in when it's lost in the great outdoors, on a public road? I guess the general rule is just to let it sit out there in the event the owner comes back looking for it, especially for items that are only of value to the owner, like my headphone carrying case (only the case, I was wearing the headphones). If it's money or the actual headphones (yup, I've lost those before) they're as good as gone, as I found out at LAX one fateful weekend when I left them in the airport......(I've lost library books before on an airplane, and the lost and found system for airplanes, as you might expect, is dreadful, so don't bring library books or anything borrowed onto a plane). MJ and her friend just found a young lady's cell phone on the beach over the winter break.....they called the owner's mother and was able to return it via those means, but that's wishful thinking to expect someone to return it that easily. With all the fancy technology avaiable to humans nowadays, it seems surprisngly simple to lose tremendously important things. Perhaps adding a tracker to all of the important items can help? A cell phone can be found through Find my phone apps cuz it's already a GPS tracker, but wallet and other pocket items? Perhaps the next stage of innovention will come up with something handy, and it would save people like me a great deal of consternation, dread, steps (I walked around a lot to find it), and regret.
Also, life hack: Just pat yourself down once in awhile when outside to make sure you have everything! Like a TSA self-imposed body check.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
No comments:
Post a Comment