Absent-mindedness and Kind Strangers

I have had many cases of absent-mindedness my whole life. It has been a hard to correct problem because it’s not like one chooses to lose valuable things. All I can do is to learn my mistakes and try to be more careful down the road. For example, about a month ago I left my cell phone in a taxi in Buenos Aires and ended up having to buy a new one. I now always double check before leaving a taxi.

Just two days ago I lost both my credit and debit cards while in Fortaleza, Brazil. I’m sure it wasn’t stolen because I always keep them in between my folded bills in my pocket. When I realized that I didn’t have the cards in my pocket anymore, the money I was carrying was still there. On that particular day I was wearing a pair of pants that have a cargo pocket on the left side. The pockets have a top and a side zipper, that latter one which was open. The cards must have fell out. I later checked and canceled them and verified that nobody had attempted to use them. Luckily, I do carry backup cards.

I have since arrived to the beach town of Jaricoacoara. Today, as I returned to my hostel in the early evening, the lady at the reception told me that they had found my credit card, and that I could go pick it up at a particular restaurant in town. As I was wondering how they heck they found me when I was 300 km away from the city I had lost the card, the lady showed me a facebook post on her computer which had a picture of my backup credit card. That’s when I realized that I longer had the backup one I was carrying this morning.

This strange and fortunate story starts with me probably dropping the card on the small town’s main street this morning. A local guy picked it up, took a picture of it, and posted it on the town’s facebook group. The lady who works at my hostel saw the facebook post, recognized my name on the card, and alerted me about it when she saw me. When I went to pick it up, I realized that the guy who found the card was my server at the restaurant I ate at last night. Since I didn’t use the card the last night, he didn’t know that I was the owner of the card until he saw me. It was just a coincidence. I was so thankful and offered to give him a reward for his extremely nice gesture, but he refused.

Losing my only backup card would have caused a lot of inconvenience since I’m moving from city to city all the time and I’d be very hard for the credit card company to send me a replacement one. I am very glad that there are great people out there to watch over this perpetual absent minded guy. I know I can’t always count on that, so from now on I will always triple check that my pocket zippers are zipped.