Dear World,
While I appreciate the impulse behind officious meddling, I would like to submit that the appropriate thing to do with, say, a phone you found, is NOT to put it in a lost and found, if you are on a campus with no central lost and found. I am so mad at you I could spit, but let’s keep this constructive. If you find a phone:
1. Leave it the fuck where it is! Unless it is about to be run over by a car, when you can discreetly move it to the side of the path outside the danger zone. No one is unaware that they don’t have their phone for more than, like, one hour, and so it is a guarantee that we careless ones will retrace our steps and then we will be all like “Oh there it is! I bless the lack of meddling meddlers who meddle.”
2. If the phone was dropped in a busy intersection, or it is clearly going to rain in the one hour window before the person finds it, you may, under these specific circumstances, pick up the phone without being a goddamned meddler. BUT THEN you should start calling people in order of recent calls. Not only is that not hard at all, but it’s so cool to be all like, hey your friend is a moron. You can then tell someone where said phone will be left, discharging your responsibility by even the narrowest moral standards of Samaritanism and making everyone happy.
3. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD do not turn it in to a mysterious and non-central lost and found.
4. I guess if it were to happen that someone did something malicious with my phone, I’d actually be less mad. Maliciousness makes more sense to me than really stupid good deeds gone awry. So, if it’s a choice between turning in the phone to a mysterious lost and found, or jumping on it with your hobnailed boots, please jump on it. At least I would have closure instead of spending two hours going from place to place on highly unreliable instructions in search of a non-existent central lost and found.
That’s all. We can do better in future, World. We just need good policies.
Sincerely,
me
UPDATE: All is forgiven! My phone was turned in to the law school’s lost and found, which is in fact a centralized location. However, the theory behind my statements is still true.
Every time I’ve ever found a phone, I’ve done either choice 1 or choice 2.
Example #1: A few tween boys were on the bus around our town, being asshats in the back and throwing things, talking sexually when they were only about ELEVEN, etc etc. They left a few stops before mine, and I noticed that one of them left his spiffy phone on the seat. I was tempted to take it, get off the bus, and throw it into the nearest trash can to teach the asshat a lesson… but instead I just switched the display language to Portuguese and left a nasty message on his title screen before placing it in the bus driver’s hands.
Example 2: I walked into a classroom, preparing to teach, and found a cell phone on a table. I hit “send” and found that her mother was the last one called… so I called her back, politely introduced myself as a teacher and told her that her daughter’s phone was lost. She was grateful, reached her on her dorm line, and the kid showed up by the end of class.
I agree whole-heartedly with your rules, except if the phone is left in a place that could induce stealing or kidnapping of said phone. Glad you got it back!
Yeah, the opposites attract thing is really pretty silly. I mean, it’s good in theory but it generally falls apart in practice.
As for Nick Hornby, you should read A Long Way Down. It’s his book about 4 people who try to commit suicide. It’s incredibly smart, sarcastic, and cynical. I think you would appreciate it.