Lost and found

We’ve had some pretty close encounters with losing important items.

My takeaway from all these experiences is a positive, optimistic view of humanity–an overall conclusion that there are always people who are willing to help, some more than others, some with better attitudes than others. But they’re out there.

The police

Our first experience was with a phone.

We got a kid phone starting when Natalie was in middle school last year, which is technically for all the kids but Natalie takes it with her to school.

Sometime in November, Natalie had started after-school Spanish classes a couple times a week, but they didn’t start until 4pm and she got out of class a bit earlier, so sometimes we’d go to a cafe in the interim. One day we went to a cafe and then were walking back to the school for her Spanish class. We had crossed a main street and were walking up the hill when she realized the phone wasn’t in her pocket.

At that point I had to go pick up the other kids from school so I couldn’t spend time searching for the phone. Natalie walked back across the street looking for it, with no luck, and at that point she decided she didn’t want to go to Spanish class either and decided to go home. I didn’t hear from her while I was gone and was scanning the sidewalk for the phone just in case, and was also constantly playing the lost mode sound. I go to text Jacob that the kid phone is lost, and I see he’s texted me a random address a few minutes earlier. He responded to my text telling me that the address was the police station where the phone was and that he was in a meeting but that the police had called him. I wanted to know more details but he didn’t respond and the kid phone wasn’t responding either. I was also wondering if Natalie had made it home fine but I had no way of knowing. Either way I couldn’t do anything about it until I had the other kids, so thirty minutes later I’m walking back with the kids and we find the police station, where they give us the phone in good condition and all is well.

It was stressful not so much because of losing the phone, but mostly because of the timing and circumstances…mostly because of Natalie refusing to just come with me to go pick up the kids, me not being able to communicate with Natalie to make sure she got home, me not being able to get ahold of Jacob, and the kids freaking out all the way home about having to go to the bathroom and having to take a detour to the police station, which actually helped with the first problem because the police let the kids use their facilities.

I have no idea if it was a police who found the phone, or a stranger who turned the phone into the police. Whoever you are, thank you.

Zity

Our second experience had a lot more complicated implications if we couldn’t locate our items, but I felt surprisingly calm, *most of the time. The whole story probably seems too long and I’m including a lot of probably irrelevant details but it just paints the picture of the unusual day it was, what feels like the often frustrating Spanish bureaucracy and very frequent lack of helpful customer service, the hit-and-miss usefulness of Zity cars, but again, the overall conclusion that people generally want to help.

(In hindsight we definitely could’ve made our lives much less complicated for many reasons, even without the lost and found incident, if we hadn’t decided to use a Zity car for the day. That’s been my experience a couple times now, actually…I think I’m going to save time and simplify things by driving myself, but it ends up much more complicated and time-consuming than it would’ve been if I’d never used the car).

So.

We had finally gotten our residence registry paperwork as well as our foreign residency cards, both very laborious and complicated processes with a lot of twists and wrong turns and dead ends along the way, and now we could use those documents to apply for a Large Family Card, which gets you discounts all across the area at museums etc for having three or more kids.

My modified filing system here is to have all of our original important documents in page protectors a binder, including birth certificates, social security cards, insurance policies, etc; our passports in a zipping binder pouch; and any working documents and copies for current applications in an accordion folder.

The day we were going to submit our paperwork at some government office for our Large Family Card, it was very rainy, and we had previously told the kids that we would just drive them to and from school on the next rainy day, so we had gotten a Zity car and were going to use it for most of the day.

When the time of our appointment at the office came I wanted to make sure we had all our bases covered–you never know if you’re going to be rejected at any of these government appointments, even if you have everything that the website and the city help line tell you that you need–so we took the whole lot–the binder, pouch, and accordion file–in Jacob’s backpack and drove in the direction of the office. It wasn’t that far away but it was pouring, so at first we were glad we drove, but then parking became very complicated and we didn’t find a spot nearby so we had to walk a few blocks in the rain anyway.

Not surprisingly, the lady at the office didn’t have a very how-can-I-help attitude and I was a bit nervous that she would say that we were missing something. But she ended up taking everything and said our application was good to go and she sent it off (but didn’t say any timeline of when we might expect to hear back…still haven’t heard anything…). (As we were exiting the building, we caught a snippet of a conversation between a guard and a frustrated constituent–the guard was telling them that they had come at the wrong time or had gotten something wrong, and they had to first call during such-and-such hours, to which the person replied, No, that doesn’t work, no one answers, etc…we kept walking and didn’t catch the rest, but from what we heard it shows what is so typical of Spanish government processes…at an office they might only allow you to show up or call at certain times, which seem very arbitrary, but they don’t post any of that information online. So you take time to arrange to go, only to be turned away.)

We walked back through the rain, drove home, and a little while later I drove to pick up Natalie from school–but she hadn’t gotten my message, so when I pulled up next to her school and didn’t see her come out, I knew we’d missed each other and she was already headed home.

We’d already told other the kids we would pick them up, and it was still raining a bit, so a little while later I drove to the kids’ school to pick them up, and we drove home without any problems, although parking was very complicated…I dropped the kids off at the front of our building, then drove around the tiny neighborhood streets for a good 15 minutes before finding a spot. It wasn’t until close to 5 when I finally finalized our day’s Zity trip on the app.

At around 730 Jacob and I are sitting around the dinner table and we suddenly realize that we never took the backpack–which contained all our important documents that took months and months and headaches and blood, sweat, and tears to obtain–out of the back of the Zity car.

We switch into full gear taking action, opening a ticket on the Zity app, emailing, calling, and messaging on Whatsapp. The Whatsapp message gave the fastest response, and luckily the guy was able to tell us where the Zity car was, and that it was available–so Jacob reserved it right away. It was a few km away downtown, and we were in Zity mode from having driven all day anyway, so we thought taking a car would be faster than the metro or the bus. I reserved a nearby Zity and we walked to the car. You can only reserve a car for 20 minutes and we thought we’d make it in time.

But there was traffic…which we should’ve considered since it was evening when everyone is getting off of work. We’re driving along and realizing that we won’t make it in time, and Jacob is already on a call with Zity (on hold for awhile) because the Whatsapp guy had texted for us to call him, and Jacob finally gets to talk to him and asks the guy if he can extend our reservation or reserve it himself for us, which the guy does say that he can do, but he tells Jacob to just wait until our current reservation runs out and then immediately book again. Would’ve been much easier if he’d just taken care of it right then…

Well of course as soon as our reservation runs out, someone else books the car. But we’re very close to where it was parked, and I think we can make it into the parking garage and see them before they take off. But the traffic is slowing us down and Jacob just gets out of the car and starts walking to the garage, getting on the line again with the Zity guy. I pull into the garage but then it turns out I jumped the gun and it was actually the next garage. Then I parked the car (in an unapproved spot) and Jacob meets up with me and tells me that the Zity guy spoke with the lady who booked the car, and said that she was willing to talk with us about the backpack and that she had given him her number to give to us. So we call the lady, and it turns out she’s already left (although we know she’s not very far) and she tells us that yes, the backpack is still in the car (phew! phew! phew!) and to just meet us where she will park the car at the end of her trip. We were kind of hoping we could just meet up really quick and grab it before she took off, but no such luck.

At this point we have given up on Zity and decide to just take a taxi to the address the lady gave us, which is exactly in the direction we just came from and even further out of town. Since we’d already put a reservation on that car we weren’t allowed to book it again until thirty minutes passed, so we couldn’t try to book the car to make sure no one else took it when the lady parked it. So Jacob is on the line with the Zity guy to see if he can just hold the car for us, which he’d told us earlier that he was able to do, but the guy doesn’t and says, Look, I don’t have all day to be helping you out with this.

????

He’s a customer service rep, that’s his job! What difference does it make if he’s on a call with us or with someone else?

But whatever. We just hoped that the car would still be there and we wouldn’t have to call a-gain to track it down.

Luckily, that was the case. We find the car, are able to book/unlock it, and get our backpack as well as an umbrella we’d left. We check the backpack, everything is still inside. What a relief!

So grateful for the fact that no one took the backpack–either because they saw it and decided to leave it, in which case I’m very grateful to those people, or because they didn’t see it at all (it did kind of blend in on the floor of the backseat and was hard to notice unless you went back there).

When I closed out the Zity trip I was tempted put a 1-star review because we were so frustrated after our conversation with the guy on the phone, but when I took a step back I realized he had actually been helpful, just not as helpful as we’d hoped. So I put long 3-star review about our experience, glad that the guy had been able to help us by telling us where the car was and giving us the lady’s number, but wishing he’d helped a little more by blocking off the car in the beginning so we wouldn’t have had to deal with the lady and the extra trips and bookings in the first place.

The next day I got an email from Zity saying that I had parked in an unapproved spot (in that garage) but that this time they were letting me off with a warning.

Thanks Zity

And especially thanks to the nice lady who was willing to work with us.

The kind stranger

For the most recent experience, it was about a Christmas gift from Jacob.

I knew what I was going to ask for Christmas–a pair of noise-cancelling earbuds. Listening to music, or fun or inspiring or educational podcasts, always makes a walk or a metro ride more positive, especially on cloudy days, and having the plug-in ones is a little annoying.

Jacob did get some for me, which I was grateful for.

I usually carry my keys, phone and headphones in my jacket pocket, but for whatever reason one day when I was picking up the kids from school I had my purse.

Grace asked me to carry her backpack, so I said we could trade–she could carry my purse, and I would carry her backpack. I never listen to anything when I’m with my kids or anyone, so I’d put the earbuds case in the front slot of the purse.

We stopped at Panaria for smoothies on the way home and were planning on heading the park once we dropped our backpacks at home, but once there I was checking my pockets and purse and immediately realized the headphones were missing. The findmy app on my phone indicated that they were near an intersection halfway between the school and our home, so I ran off to that spot, switching the device to lost mode and pinging the lost sound the whole way, to kind of let anyone know the owner was actively looking for the headphones, and to help me hear where they might be.

I got to the intersection and after pinging around I ended up finding the case on top of a trash can–but the earbuds weren’t inside. I kept looking and pinging around more but couldn’t see them anywhere, even though findmy indicated that they hadn’t moved…so I figured the charge was out and someone had taken them.

Oh well.

At some point I was fiddling more with the findmy app and found an option to put my contact info while the device was in lost mode, so I put on my email.

Sometime after dinner and the kids were in bed I glanced at findmy and noticed that one of the headphones had changed locations, so I decided to go out and try tracking them down again. I thought maybe someone had found them, then decided to ditch them. The new location was just a few blocks away from the intersection. It was dark and late so I had a brief thought wondering if it was safe for me to go out, and potentially confront someone who had taken the earbuds, but I saw other people about, including women by themselves, and we haven’t had any safety issues in this area. Besides, I have confidence to know how to take care of myself if anything were to go weird, and really my source of confidence comes from believing in divine intervention if things were really wrong and I wasn’t supposed to go. But after careful consideration I felt safe so I went ahead with it.

So I get to some apartment buildings, and the findmy locator is kind of spotty–the icon moves a couple times. I’m walking around, pinging constantly, scouring the sidewalk and any shrubbery. I asked a couple of ladies sitting on a bench if they’d seen any headphones around, which they kindly replied that they hadn’t. Finally I figured they must be in one of the apartments and I decided to just go home.

I’m very glad I went out, though, because we hardly ever go out at night, and around the bullfighting arena there’s a nice clear patch of sky and I could actually see some stars.

I get home and am winding down getting ready for bed, checking my email, and suddenly I see an email from someone named Francisco, subject line: Airpods encontrados. Found airpods!

He wrote that he had found them in the street and that he was willing to arrange for me to pick them up, and that he knew how frustrating it was to lose a device so he was glad he’d been able to contact me. I was effusively grateful in my response, and we arranged to meet the next day at 430, which would be the time when I would be walking home with the kids from school.

I was still cautious about the encounter so I made sure the meeting place was in a busy area, the same intersection where they’d been lost, and I made sure to have the kids stand way off to the side by a building while I went up to the crosswalk. It’s a couple minutes before 430 but I’m lingering around the crosswalk and make eye contact with a classy gentleman, maybe in his fifties, crossing the street.

-Francisco?

-Tonya?

We greeted and shook hands, and he handed the airpods. He was so kind! It turns out he had even taken the time to take them to an electronics store and somewhere else to ask if there was any way to track down the owner.

I forgot to ask him how he had ended up seeing my email, if it was because he had an iphone and the notification appeared on his phone the minute I put the info in lost mode, or if the people at the store had helped him.

Either way, he was very kind and I was so grateful, even though it turns out they must have gotten run over by a vehicle because the right one was a little crunched and doesn’t work, and the left one works but runs out of charge so quickly.