I’ll be on my way out the door and realize that I left the travel mug full of coffee that I just made to take with me behind, so I go to get it, and it isn’t in the kitchen where I thought it was, so I have to wander around the house trying to figure out where I set it down. I’ll eventually find it near a light switch I turned off before leaving, and then when I get to the door I’ll realize that I don’t have my keys. The keys that were just in my hand a minute ago before I started looking for the coffee. And don’t think I set the keys down where the coffee mug was, because that would be too easy, no they’re going to be somewhere else entirely.
I’ve managed to waste an entire hour sometimes just trying to find things I had a second ago that I need to take with me on an errand.
So back in August I wasn’t that surprised when I received a box in the mail from a hotel I had stayed at the week before…
I should explain that it had been my Mom’s birthday. We had planned to go down the weekend of her birthday, take her to dinner, visit with other members of the family, and so on. I’d booked a hotel room months before, at a hotel we’ve stayed at several times. Less than a week before the trip, Michael hurt his back at work, and it was very uncomfortable for him to sit still and upright for any length of time. Not to mention he was tired and grumpy all week because he wasn’t sleeping well.
So, he stayed in Seattle while I drove down by myself. Mom and I had a fun couple of days together. I fixed a couple of her computer problems, met a bunch of her neighbors, spent a bit of time with my sister and her kids, and we all did the cake and ice cream thing.
The whole trip had been great. Until the drive back. What is usually a two-and-a-half hour or three hour trip took about six. Traffic was just horrible. At one point I saw cars ahead of me swerving and hitting their brakes, then the next thing I saw was shiny hunks of metal (and other debris) tumbling up the road at me. Mostly I was stuck in stop and go traffic for hours, and only saw the aftermath of accidents that had been cleaned up long before I got to them.
I hadn’t eaten dinner. After the second traffic backup, I got into a weird head space where I Just. Wanted. To. Get. Home.
I was a bit irrational.
So I arrived at home fairly late Sunday night and was starving. Michael had spent most of the weekend in bed, and hadn’t been eating at usual times, so was very amenable to running to an all night drive-through with me. I carried things in from the car, but I didn’t unpack anything that night. And for the next couple of days Everything just sat where I’d piled it.
A few days later, when I came home from work we found a box addressed to me sitting on our doorstep. As soon as I read the return address aloud, my husband grinned and said, “Okay, what did you leave behind?”
I had no idea. I tore the box open and found… a black hooded sweatshirt with the logo of some kind of team or club or maybe a band. I’d never seen the emblem of the sweatshirt before. It smelled distinctly of cigarette smoke, so it definitely wasn’t ours.
We had several theories of what had happened. Since I was at the room only one night, and by myself, and I spent most of the time away from the hotel, I hadn’t really examined the room closely. I’d dumped my stuff on one bed, and didn’t use the drawers or the closet in the room. And since I didn’t use them, I hadn’t looked in them very closely. It was entirely possible that whoever stayed in the room before me had left the sweatshirt, and neither I nor the person who cleaned the room before I checked in had seen it.
Or maybe it was left behind in a room adjacent to mine, and the housekeeper just said the wrong room number when she turned it in at the office.
So I called the hotel to tell them they’d sent it to the wrong person, and that I could mail it back. The person who answered didn’t know anything about it, and said she’d get her manager to call me.
What I should have done is just mailed it back right then. But I waited for a call.
About a week later, I was writing on my laptop when a message popped up that Time Machine (the built-in Mac backup utility) hadn’t been able to attach to my second backup drive for 10 days. I have my laptop back up to both a network drive (which is available all the time), plus to a portable drive (the specific model was called a G-Drive) that I connect from time to time. The last time I had used the G-Drive was during the trop for Mom’s birthday, so I went looking for the bag that I has all my travel computer stuff.
The G-Drive wasn’t there. So I looked in my backpack, the duffle bag I’d packed clothes in for the trip, and all over the house. No sign of the drive.
But I lose things all the time. I waited until Michael was home, and we both searched the house again. We couldn’t find it.
And that’s when I realized what had happened. I had left the portable disk behind (in its cute little blue zipper case along with some adaptor cables and related items) at the hotel, and some other guest in another room had left the sweatshirt. The hotel had shipped me the sweatshirt and the other guest the G-Drive.
“Well, someone got a really good value out of that trade,” Michael commented.
The G-Drive was over two years old, and it used a firewire connection, which is faster than USB, but a slower than thunderbolt, which my laptop supports. I hadn’t bought a thunderbolt drive when I bought laptop because no one was making them, yet, and when they did come out later that year, they were prohibitively expensive. But thunderbolt external drives are much more plentiful now, and they’ve come down in price, so even though I did call the hotel (again), rather than wait to see if the other guest had the drive and/or it had been returned, I bought a new drive.
During the second call, by the way, again the person I called didn’t know anything and promised someone from the office would call.
I figured that whoever had the drive now was happily using their free hardware. Odds were that they had plugged it into a Windows machine, and it would have been unable to read the Journalled Mac format, and would have given them a message like, “This drive is not formatted, you must erase and format it before it can be used.” And they had done so.
Anyway, my new thunderbolt drive, which actually cost less than the G-Drive had originally, is a lot faster, so I figured it’s all good.
Then, finally, one afternoon someone from the hotel called me. They were very anxious to find out if I still had the hoodie, because it was of very sentimental value to the person who lost it. I mentioned that I’d called a couple times, and asked if perhaps the person who was asking about the hoodie was willing to trade my hard disk back for it.
“What hard disk?”
So I explained everything, and the woman on the phone was very confused. She said she hadn’t been involved in the original mailing to me, but she would check with her manager.
I said I would ship the hoodie back.
Now, given my introduction to this tale, you might expect me to say that I couldn’t find the hoodie. But no, the hoodie was exactly where I thought I’d put it. I packaged it up, along with a note identifying myself, the date I had stayed at the hotel, the fact that I had lost a hard drive (along with a description of the drive and the case), and asked that they call me. And I mailed it.
No one called me.
A couple weeks later Michael and I were packing for the convention. Michael had forgotten that the con started on Thursday, so he hadn’t gotten that day off. So we were going to pack the car, then he would head to work and I would drive to the con, check in to the hotel, and set up the dealer’s table. He would take the train down after work.
As we packed he asked me where the portable wireless internet modem he’d had me take down to Mom’s “just in case” was. “Didn’t I already give it to you?”
The modem is very small, and easily fits in a pocket. It only works where the Clear network has 4G wireless coverage, however, so it hadn’t worked at all in the small town where Mom lives. I had tried it, confirmed that it didn’t get any signal, then packed it away and used my iPad’s hotspot capabilities for my own internet access while I was there.
As we searched for it, I suddenly had a horrible, sinking feeling. It’s very small, as I said, and both it and it’s power cable would have easily fit into the cable pocket inside the blue zipper case that I carried the G-Drive and its cables in.
And I had a very vague memory or sticking the modem into something I knew I would be getting into soon after getting home. The G-Drive case fit the bill.
I apologized profusely.
Michael shrugged and said, “It wasn’t that expensive, and I can probably buy another one at work.”
He went to work, I did things like take out the trash and so forth before loading the last things into the car. And when I went to put my iPad into a little shoulder bag I use when I’m taking my external keyboard with the iPad, there was something in the slot where the iPad goes.
The modem and its cable.
I texted Michael right away. “I found it. Don’t buy a new modem.” I even took a picture of it, so he would know I wasn’t hallucinating.
He texts back. “Guess what I just bought…”
So we have two, now.
There has still been no sign of the hard disk.
I’m not sure what I want to do about it. It still seems to me that the most likely explanation of why the hotel mailed the hoodie to me is the mix-up scenario. You would think, since they had a record of shipping a lost item to me, that they would have a record of shipping a lost item to another customer. You would think that they would at least ask the other customer if per chance did they receive something that wasn’t theirs.
You would think.
Maybe the other person denied receiving the hard disk. Maybe it was a family staying at the hotel, and the person who lost the hoodie didn’t happen to be the person who had, weeks earlier, opened a mysterious box to find a free piece of computer equipment inside, and then never told anyone about it.
Maybe the hard disk is sitting in some weird spot in our house that neither Michael or I have thought to look. Or maybe I left it somewhere other than the hotel.
Except I keep coming back to the hoodie. Why did the hotel mail it to me?
The world may never know…
Font Folly 