The Prodigal Laptop

A couple weekends ago, I lost my work laptop. It was a brand spanking new Powerbook, and I had just spent the prior month painstakingly moving my data over and configuring it. Then, I decided to do some work (performance reviews) in a cafe while Edward took the kids shopping. When I was done, I walked over to Target and put my laptop in the shopping cart. (Y'all know where this is going.) Since the kids were in the cart, I shoved the laptop in the folded seat section, and, of course, totally forgot about it until hours later. We rushed back to the store, but no one had turned in a laptop. At that point, we figured that it was long gone and most likely making its way to eBay.

Then, two days later, I got an IM from a co-worker. If one could giggle over IM, he was doing exactly that as he informed me that he had located my laptop. Apparently, an Apple employee who was his customer from a previous life had found the laptop at Target, checked with the Apple store, and figured out it was registered to Google. She then called a few people she knew at Google, one of whom was my co-worker who said, "Yes, yes I do know an Ellen Lee!" And just like that, I was able to be re-united with my laptop. Hooray!!

So, I was certainly relieved and happy to have found my laptop. But more than that, I was extremely moved to see that people out there do care about doing the right thing. The woman who found my laptop could have just turned the laptop over to some lost and found and been done with it. But instead, she really went out of her way, made a real effort to hunt me down, and then personally returned the laptop into my hands. How cool is that?