Jeepstone

Lost and found Fairies

I’ve been wondering what percentage of items that are strewn around the streets, on fence posts, on railings, in puddles, are ever returned to their owners.The Winter is a time of year for giving, sharing, drinking and losing. The abundance of lost items such as hats, gloves (and strangely, shoes) amazes me. Granted, the majority are childrens items, but the assortment of other items is sometimes staggering.

However, we should bear a thought for the lost and found fairies who go out early in the morning and place these misplaced items in locations that people will notice (ie, a convenient wall). They probably go out hanging onto the back of the gritter lorries, picking up muddied gloves as they go.

But Why?

This is the crux. Do they know how successful they are? Do they have any form of Management Information that shows items collected against people reunited with said items? What is the percentage? I reckon that for every 5 items placed on a wall, only 1 is ever reunited with an owner, and let’s bear in mind, for them to be truly successful, it needs to be the right owner!

So with such a low success rate, they must do it for the love of the job. Reuniting lost property was always the last job to go when jobs were handed out at school. Perhaps it’s just an army of elderly failures?

Tags: found, gloves, hats, lost, scarves

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.