A lot of time was spent during this weekend looking for lost stuff, which is always an adventure for everyone involved.
On Saturday, the daughter lost her wallet at SM. She discovered it missing around afternoon and told me about it only when we met up to pick her up, which was already early evening. She had apparently spent the entire afternoon retracing her steps with her friends, asking store staff if they saw it, and I had missed her call because I was up in the boonies at the time, where the subscriber cannot be reached and there is no data for a call from a messaging app, which is the preferred mode of communication these days.
The financial damage wasn’t that bad, as the missing wallet didn’t have a lot of cash. I was also glad to learn that she quickly blocked her ATM using her phone banking app, which meant we trained her well in terms of emergency lost wallet response protocols.
However, she was totally heartbroken over the lost wallet, which was a gift from a tita, which ironically, being an uncommon Swiss brand, is not very recognizable as a quality item and might be even mistaken as cheap to those uninitiated with the brand. The downside is since it doesn’t look like a typical wallet and more like a coin purse, that unfortunately means her lost item has a high chance of being given less importance and might have not been given the proper lost and found treatment had it been picked up.
Anyway, she had already retraced her steps and asked several storekeepers if a lost wallet had been turned over, but forgot to check with the mall lost and found. That was where we ended up, since part of the healing process is exhausting every effort to find the lost item. The friendly guard on duty took down the details of the lost item and also asked her colleagues over the radio of anything similar had been reported lost, but as of that time, we’ve done what we can and my daughter is left with praying for a minor miracle as the only remaining solution.
If there was one thing I realized from daughter’s lost wallet incident, it is that lost and found isn’t a big thing here. I don’t know if we were misinformed by the guard, but we ended up deep inside the bowels of the mall admin area to try a lost and found section. In hindsight, maybe going to the mall concierge or information desk might have done the job, but the point here is that lost and found doesn’t seem to be a priority. Is it because Filipinos don’t return lost items?
The following day, the wife lost her makeup pouch, which was unfortunately the one with the good makeup. She discovered it was missing only after we got back home from mass, running some errands, picking up manong at the mall, and dinner out. She thinks it fell from the car when she opened the door in one of those many stops.
Anyway, we ended up going on a late night joyride to different parking lots of the city, in a last-ditch effort to recover the lost pouch. From Silay, we went to the parking lots of Robinsons, Bob’s Café, SM, and even to the St. James the Greater church that is currently in the middle of nowhere. It was another round of therapy for people with lost items that unfortunately for us, ended in despair, instead of a miraculous recovery. It was already almost midnight when we got back home after that not-so-joyride, so there were no more open lost and found booths to go to.
When we lost two items that were deemed important enough to spend time searching for this weekend, the topic of Apple AirTags certainly came up. Yes, it would be nice to have the ability to track items that we don’t want to get lost, but considering the price of an AirTag, we can’t really put it on everything we own. I, for one, cannot imagine putting an AirTag in my wallet. And even if my wife considered her makeup pouch important enough to consider going on a midnight joyride for, I don’t think that particular pouch would warrant an AirTag.
Losing things has always been a part of life and growing up, and it is from those incidents that most of us learn the hard way, how to better take care of our stuff. These days, we have technology that can make it easier to find certain items, as long as you have the budget. But what we seem to be forgetting are the good old fashioned lost and found counters that can make it easier for good Samaritans to turn over lost items they find and should be an automatic option for anyone who loses anything in place where those booths exist.
If only we had more good hearted people in the world, and lost and found booths are manned properly in order to facilitate the easier return of anything that is lost, we might not won’t need to put expensive AirTags on everything we own. Maybe good old fashioned values can still be better than cutting edge tech.*
