The Departed

Feature—Sunday Magazine, 2007

There’s no shame in admitting you have a problem. That was your third phone, we’re not even counting the one destroyed by baby goo. Then there’s your keys, wallet, oxygen tank … we’ll discuss that later, your Venus Vibrance pink rubber jandals, your King James Bible, your mind, possibly. All gone. The pattern I’m seeing here is of general disorder mixed with occasional intoxication and a deep disregard for your possessions. I feel your pain, I do; your life was in that phone. I understand the pressures of a wired existence, the need to maintain an umbilical connection to our modern communications networks, the ease with which a wafer-thin widget can slither between the seats of a taxi cab and leave you lost and lonely; the way you can shove your life inside a laptop and then leave that laptop on a bus and leave that bus and not look back. There was sensitive information on that laptop; there were pictures … of “things.”

If you visit Wellington Central Train Station’s information desk you’ll find a reasonably sympathetic guy named Trevor. Behind him you’ll find a small room stacked high with filing boxes and sweating plastic rubbish bags. Don’t look in the bags, that’s my advice. In the boxes, though, you’ll find booty the likes of which ye’ve never seen: coats, hats, bags, shoes, wallets, keys, a black motorcycle helmet—because riding the train can be dangerous—essential and non-essential medicine, newspapers, school projects and art portfolios, a Jim Beam embossed leather hip-flask—because riding the train can be boring. “Note: empty,” say’s Darren Nichols, Head of Security, as he gives the flask a little shake. Darren’s an affable Brit whose good nature belies his no BS job title. As he holds up a pair of bright-pink jandals he exclaims: “Venus Vibrance, size 38. Very nice.” “You get a lot of footwear then?” “Oh yes,” he says, turning the pink wads of rubber in his hands and staring into the middle distance. “My son lost two pairs of shoes on the trains last year.”

And so it goes on. The books are fascinating, place-marked with movie tickets, till receipts, a haunting photograph of a girl in a white colonial-style dress posing in front of a Christmas tree. There’s a tattered acupuncture and reflexology manual, a research paper: Dust Accumulation in the Region Since the Last Glacial Maximum, a small book of quotations by Lao Tzu,

To have little is to possess. To have plenty is to be perplexed.

It boggles the mind. “What’s the strangest thing that’s ever come in, Trevor?” He won’t say, “ … for legal reasons.” “Was it sex devices?” “Oh yeah, we get a bit of that on the trains.” “Must be those Metrosexuals,” I suggest, and Trevor say’s nothing. “We get a bit of drugs,” says Darren helpfully, appearing from the back room with a pair of giant binoculars and some cassettes. “A few weapons,” say’s Trevor. “What’s on those tapes?” I ask. “Rock around the clock. Wham — Make it Big.”

I know what you’re thinking: without weapons, drugs, vibrators and the music of Wham, what did he not want to mention?

“But yeah, it’s mostly phones,” say’s Trevor, “phones and keys.”

To retire when the task is complete, that is the way of heaven. But where is my Blackberry?

There’s a saying in the lost and found community: “You loose it, we’ll find it, hold onto it for a while, maybe try to get it back to you if we can.” It’s not a very good saying, but what do you want? If these people didn’t have to spend their days heaving boxes of keys and wallets and sacks of fetid clothing they might have time to come up with a better saying. “A fool and his Treo are soon parted.” Something like that. But every day it seems to get worse. Every day you show up at their desk, lurching wild-eyed from the shadows to hiss, “I lost my preciousssssssss, it hads all me numbersssssssssss.”

Gary at the Wellington Airport Police Station effuses on your ability to shed your belongings. “Just bizarre stuff. Let me switch you to the other line so I can get the book.” “The book” records every item handed in at Wellington airport: phones, wallets, passports, cameras, laptops. You leave expensive clothes, jackets, and suits; you remove your jewelry at the metal detectors and then just wander away; you stand and walk off without your walking stick, maybe you scream “I’m healed!” I don’t know. You buy splendid flagons of duty-free liquor and then you just leave them sitting in the terminal. “Where does that go, Gary, not the Sally Army?” “Ha. No, I think they give it to the local Hospice.” Actually, they don’t any more, but they used to. Palliative booze. They also used to send the prescription glasses to the Pacific Islands.

He who tiptoes cannot stand, he who strides cannot walk, please use the handrails when ascending.

Taxis are a whole new bag. They offer a phenomenon—peculiar, as far as I can tell, to taxis—that completely inverts the lost property model. Often, they tell me, you’ll get out of the taxi at the hotel and remember your phone, your wallet; you’ll pay the driver and thank him, wave as he moves off down the street. Then you’ll stand there for a few more seconds, do that little sighing thing you do, then turn to your wife and the guy with the trolley and say something brilliant like, “Probably should have got the bags out.”

The taxis get the flash stuff; we ditch laptops, iPods and flabby rolls of cash in cabs. Size is no object; last year, a group left a 6x10 metre purple tarpaulin in a taxi van. Apparently, they had been drinking. “We also get a lot of jewelry, Smurf outfits, gorilla heads, you know,” says John from Wellington Combined Taxis. Well, they say you should put one more thing on before you leave the house.

The buses seem to get a greater volume than the trains, “Oh yeah, big room, heaps of boxes,” say’s Joe from Go Wellington, “We get probably four big boxes a month.” It’s amazing,” he says, “it’ll be three months later and Mum’ll ring ‘cos she just noticed her boy’s shoes are missing.” He laughs heartily, as do I, stupid Mum. “But yeah, phones, heaps of phones. And keys.”

The way is forever nameless, though the path is narrow. To listen to your message again, press 1.

Sonia Viles from the Wellington Central Police Station Lost Property Department wants to know why you haven’t called. She has your wallet, your keys, your prescription eyeglasses. There must be, I’m guessing, several hundred pairs of glasses here. Prescription glasses are expensive. All you have to do to get them back is drop her a line and the fact that you don’t makes her tense. Why are you making Sonia tense?

She and Fraser Simpson take me on a grand tour of the property room, pointing to stuff and shaking their heads. They show me phones, at least a hundred, probably more, from the latest Nokia to a foot-long beast that looks like it could be used to call in tactical air support. Within the cave we find assorted licence plates, a King James bible, a Pétanque set, school bags, car radios, a tool belt, a mud-streaked midi-system recovered from a park, a big-screen TV, a ukulele, a section from a windsurfer, skateboards, body boards, a framed photo of a Greek island, a fire extinguisher, an oxygen cylinder from a scuba diving kit. I can’t imagine the narrative thread that lead to you losing your oxygen tank, but when you finally get out of that decompression chamber, give Sonia a call, I beg you.

“Sometimes, in my darkest moments I think, oh they’re just using us as a storage. When you ring them they say, ‘Yep, I’m coming in,’ and then they just leave it cos they know it’s safe here. So that’s why I get on the phone and say ‘C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, Sonia’s running out of room!’”

She and Fraser slave to return your stuff, too, even though you make it tough. You could help them by putting an emergency contact number in your phone. Better still, you could slip a contact number under the back panel. A digital camera has onboard clues. “Sometimes we can get in there and look at the photos and if there’s a car registration number, that’s one way we get them back.”

Then there’s the safe: bracelets, watches, money, brooches, pendants rings. “Ladies please!” say’s Sonia. There’s got to be thousands of dollars worth in there. It’s a myth, by the way, that no one hands in money. “People come and say, ‘I lost $800, but don’t worry, they won’t bring it in.’ I had the pleasure last week of ringing up a guy and saying ‘Guess what!’ And those are the bouquets, I guess, that’s the payoff.”

To arrive somewhere you must leave the place you are. Reset your microwave clock.

These lost property people are some of the most good-natured folk you’d ever meet, and they bring to their job a conscientiousness completely at odds with our own neglectfulness. They take security seriously too. When I show up at parliament I’m confronted with the kind of reception usually reserved for international shoe-bombers. Four guards watch my bag trundle through an x-ray machine. There’s a few more lurking around the corner, ready, alert—like cobras, some more through the glass doors to the left. They all have ear-pieces. What’re they listening to? “You are a strong and confident person. You can take command of any situation.” They seem relaxed and friendly. Still, when I quiz one about their lost property arrangements he looks at me like I just asked him if we could go into the corner and spoon. Parliament’s position on lost property is that they don’t talk about lost property. Which is fine.

Darren Nichols has a similar, if less hysterical, attitude. He tells me that, in theory, descriptions of lost items could give individuals clues on how better to plant bombs on trains. I underline something in my notes that might say “Terrorism issue: important?” but that actually say’s “Get bread, cheese.” I’m not being flip, you just can’t make eye contact with someone who suggests that your story might abet Al Qaeda. “I have this week’s issue of Sunday, brothers, we strike tonight!”

At Capital E, the experiential learning center for kids, they’re less concerned with national security and more with our children’s ability to shed clothing like a tumble-drier with the door open. “We get a ton of clothes and shoes,” say’s Morag Zaric, Operations Support Manager, and she gestures towards a greasy black beanie lying on her desk. Someone else wanders over to share a story. “Someone left a pooh in the bouncy castle.” Bless.

Because of a great love, one is courageous. Because of children, one is late.

Back at the train station, Darren emerges from the back room with an enormous Bible. “Wow, I bet you don’t get many of those.” “Couple-a-year,” say’s Trevor, casually. Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of lost property, in case you were wondering. He got the job because a novice borrowed his Psalter without asking and was compelled to return it by a terrifying apparition. Interestingly, Anthony gets to look after all lost items except keys. If you’ve lost your keys, (and looking in these boxes it’s clear that you have,) you have to talk to Zita. Angels once baked bread for Zita while she prayed. I bet it was nice bread.

The most unusual thing ever left behind on a Wellington train was a huge gold telescope. “It was HUGE,” says Trevor, and stretches out his arms. The owner and artefact were reunited. He was not, apparently, a wizard. What’s the deal here? How do you loose a giant gold telescope? How do you lose anything, for that matter? And why is it getting worse?

Obviously there are timeless factors involved—age, intoxication—but there are also factors specific to the age we live in—shrinking devices, the relative disposability of modern consumer electronics, El Nino. Dr. Marc Wilson from the Victoria University Department of Psychology points out that losing things has a lot more to do with breaks in our routine than with memory. “We’re more likely to forget things when our routine is broken—when your alarm doesn’t go off and you’re late for work you get out of the routine of watch, wallet, specs, keys, etc.”

We all have our morning routine and if things happen in a certain order it can flow as if by magic: alarm, shower, dress, breakfast, bags, lunches, wallet, phone, specs, keys, report on glacial maximums, go! But if anything should happen to break that routine it can unleash unholy hell: alarm, snooze, sleep, kids, shit! panic, keys? coffee—lap, Aggghhhh! The nocturnal equivalent of this farce is: bar, mojitos, argument, taxi, crying, phone, seat, gone.

That’s why you can put on a full face of makeup while dressing the kids and changing lanes on the motorway—because you do it every morning. That’s why your teenage children can text their friends while communicating with you in a series of primitive grunts. And that’s why I had to skulk back in to Wellington Central Police Station last week, just minutes after leaving. I needed to retrieve my tape-recorder. It isn’t something I use every day, it has no “place” in my routine, it’s an intruder. How they laughed, Fraser and Sonia, their laughter echoed down the corridors, it followed me home, taunting me. “Are you gonna put that in your story?” cried Sonia, with well-earned glee, and I replied, “Perhaps.”