I’m the kind of girl who loses things at the drop of a hat. Mittens, earrings, cards, books, sanity. The more stressed out I am, the more I lose.

The process of finding lost items is an even worse ordeal. I sometimes feel like the victim of a sadistic hocus-pocus trick a la those shrinking Muggle door keys . After copiously retracing lost steps, peeking into empty classrooms, questioning secretaries, and crossing my fingers, I usually discover the ugly fact &mdash I’m never getting it back.

Last semester, I found myself locked myself out of hearth and home. The keys had flown the coop. I swore they were in the room. They weren’t. I fumed for days. Green carbine, pink Swiss army knife, blue charm…what could be more conspicuous? I dutifully looked in obscure corners, stalked nocturnal cleaning people, called the University police. No luck.

My detective work convinced me that Penn needs to adopt a centralized lost and found system. No one’s accountable for your lost stuff, but Penn can at least make it easier for finders to locate owners. I can attest to a 100 percent failure rate in recovering lost items through the system.

Here’s a round up of the current situation. Say you’ve lost an object somewhere on the area of campus that stretches from 34th to 40th, Spruce to Walnut. First, check at the info desk in Huntsman Hall. All the Wharton buildings have a central lost & found. Purses and valuables are locked up; lost things stay put rather than circulating from department to department to municipal dump.

For Perelman Quad, try the info desk in Houston Hall . Be quick about it though &mdash found items are kept for about a month before being permanently purged. All transactions are kept in a log book. Items range from the humdrum (scarves, cell phones) to the bizarre (a pregnancy belt).

For other buildings on campus, policies are much more diffuse. Inside Riepe College House, for example, no lost and found exists. If I drop something as I’m running to class, chances are it ends up in the trash or in the domain of some local RA.

All this is not to condone negligence. Yet Penn needs to turn the campus into less of a finders keepers territory by publicizing and standardizing policies in each building. In the meantime, keep a vigilant eye out on your own valuables.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 5:45 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.