How I lost faith in humanity … and my short term memory

It took me 10 months after the birth of my daughter, but I’ve finally managed to return to a weekly workout regimen, albeit to a limited extent. There’s a great gym at work, which is small but functional, and one which I try to visit twice a week during my lunch break. This gym has free weights, treadmills, machines, showers – the works. So to take advantage of this facility, and free up time in the evenings, I’ve taken to bringing gym clothes, a towel, and miscellaneous toiletries with me in the mornings. Except that I keep forgetting the gym bag that contains these items on the train into work.

Apparently there is a Lost and Found process in place to recover items left behind by passengers, but I have yet to see it work. First, you have to rely on the honesty of fellow passengers and the train conductors to not make off with whatever you’ve left behind. Second, you have to wait a day before misplaced items are collected together and sent back to downtown Chicago for storage in the Lost and Found office. Finally, you have to navigate the world’s most arcane office hours to contact someone at this office to figure out if your article has been located. Below is a picture of the hours that the Lost and Found office is actually open:

Of interest is the fact that the office is not open before 8am and after 5pm, and is not open on weekends or holidays. 90% of the passengers on the train have to be office workers, some of whom are leaving the city to get to far-flung suburbs for work (i.e., yours truly). How we are expected to make it back to the city before the office closes is beyond me, unless I have the gall to walk into my boss’s office and say I need to leave work over an hour early because I need to find a missing gym bag.

Of even greater interest is the set of random times that the office remains closed: 9am- 9:30am, 11am-11:15am, 1pm-2pm, and then 3:15-3:55pm. What the hell are these? Bathroom breaks? Union mandated smoking breaks? Why do you randomly need a 30 minute break, then a 15 minute break, then an hour break, and then, bizarrely, a 40 minute break at the end of the day? WTF?! Every time I’m between meetings at work, or have 5 minutes to myself, I’ll reach for the phone to see if I can call the Lost and Found office … until I realize that the office is not open.

The rare instances where I’ve gotten through to someone, I’ve been told that nothing matching my description has showed up. Why? Who wants my old gym clothes? This is the second time I’ve lost a gym bag – the first time I lost the shoes in which I ran the Chicago marathon. They were old, but nice. The second time I lost the second pair of shoes I bought to replace the first pair. These were not old at all, and were nice. Who looks inside a gym bag and says, “Cool – size 12 ½ Mizuno shoes for medium pronators with a large toe box. Just what I needed!” And both times the gym bag was nice – the second time it happened to be a bag I had received as part of a recognition award at IBM. Why people, why?! Why are you walking away with my stuff and not turning it in? I’d understand if I’d misplaced an iPhone. I’d know better than to expect a return of something like that. But gym bags with sweaty clothes and used shoes? Really?

I’m losing faith in my short term memory, and fast. But I’m losing faith in humanity faster. Give me back my gym clothes!