People leave stuff at my work a lot–normally in the pockets of clothing, which we label with the same name as the one associated with the clothes and put in a drawer. But sometimes they leave something bigger, like the bags they brought the clothes in. That’s a little trickier. If we notice right away, we remember or can check who the last customer was and can label it and stick it on a shelf. If we don’t and don’t recognize it, it goes on the same shelf, and eventually someone comes around looking for it and we give it back.
So one day I found myself looking at a hamper that had been sitting unlabeled on a shelf for a few weeks. It’s pretty neat–washer-load-sized, sits nicely open, snaps flat when empty. Hmm . . . I need a hamper. I asked Maria,
“Do we know whose that is?”
“Nope.”
“… can I take it?”
She shrugged agreeably, so I grabbed it on my way home.
(Note: We are very honest, at my workplace. We find valuable things in pockets every week–ranging from full BART cards to thumb drives to more than six hundred dollars in cash once–and with the exception of the obviously trivial we always give it back. If it’s really important we’ll also call them, as as happened for credit cards and passports. My point here is that I wouldn’t just go “yoink” just because something had been left behind; I let it sit around for a while first and then made sure we didn’t know whose it was.)
I didn’t bother setting it up, I just propped it folded up against my dresser and wandered off out of town for the weekend.
At the end of my next workday, a fairly regular customer came and dropped off a big armful of shirts. In the small talk as I took that in and fetched his pickup, he asked,
“Say, did I leave a white collapsible hamper here?”
“Dunno,” I said, straightfaced. “I’ll check around and give you a call if it turns up.”
Maria was politely silent until he left.
“God damn it,” I said.
“It’s pretty cheap,” she pointed out. “He can get a new one.”
“Meh. Nah.”
I wasn’t about to fess up to having taken it, but nor was I going to keep it, cheap or not. Stupid morals. On the plus side, she’s right, I saw the same or a very similar hamper at Walgreens and it’s pretty cheap. I think they come in two-packs, though. I’ll ask around and see if anyone wants the other one.