Wallet News

As I posted last week, my wallet mysteriously vanished while I was out one night. Well, last Monday I was woken up at 2 in the morning my our front desk receptionist letting me know that he had just gotten off the phone with a Metropolitan police officer who had found my wallet. It had been turned in nearly a week after I lost it. The receptionist gave me the phone number and name of the officer, so I called right away on Tuesday morning, but couldn't get through to anyone. The phone just rang and rang, no answering machine, no one picking up. After getting another, more detailed, note from that receptionist on Tuesday morning, I decided to go ahead and call the non emergency number for the police in order to somehow track down the officer who called about my wallet. After about 20 minute on the phone with the operator, she determined that my wallet was turned into the Shoreditch office, but has been transferred to the Stoke Newington office because Stoke Newington holds the property office for the borough of Hackey, where my wallet was turned in. The operator also told me that the property office is only open from 8-2 each day, and as I was talking to her on Tuesday, I had to wait until Wednesday to go collect it. She gave me the name of the nearest tube stop, and early Wednesday morning I headed out to get my wallet.
Turns out, the nearest tube station, isn't actually near...at all. It's about an hour walk from the tube to the station, and at this point I had zero cash for a taxi since I hadn't gotten my wallet or replacement card yet. Just getting to the station put me in a crappy mood since it was terrible weather and a much longer journey than I had anticipated, plus the area of Hackey isn't the nicest part of London, so that on top of everything else just made me cranky. Then I got to the station.... I arrived there at 11.30, didn't leave til 2.30. Three hours of waiting in line. There literally was no one working the receptionist area of the station, so the line just kept queuing and queuing, everyone getting more and more agitated. When I got there, the man at the front of the line said he had already been waiting for two hours and hadn't been helped. I figured that since I allowed two and a half hours before the property office closed, that would be enough time, but I grew increasingly worried that I would have come all the way out here, stood in line for hours, only to get helped after the office closed. Everyone grew increasingly crankier as we all stood there with officers walking by, but not stopping to help us. Thankfully my matter wasn't that serious, but I can't imagine how mad I would have been had I had to wait that long for a serious issue. Anyways, everyone's in a bad mood, tired of standing in line, and then walks in the drunk man. He comes through the door, pushes through the queue, sits his Jack and Coke in a can down on the receptionist desk ledge and proceeds to attempt to break through the door to get to the area where the actual officers were. Every time he failed, he'd take a sip of his Jack and Coke, pull a handle out of his bag to take a few sips, then tried again. At one point he was violently yelling at a woman behind the door who was finally getting some assistance for not letting him inside the office. The door is electronic, a button inside needs to be pressed for it to open, but this drunk man did not seem to understand nor care. Finally an officer saw he was acting up, and told him to queue with everyone else, at which point he proceeded to ask every woman in line whether or not they were married. If they responded yes, he told them all about how his marriage failed, if they responded no, he continued to tell them what they needed to improve in order to make that happen. In hindsight it was entertaining, but at the time this man actually scared me and after walking through the rain and standing for so long, I was less than enthused.

I finally got helped, only to find out that my wallet wasn't actually there. It was transferred to the lost property office on Baker Street- I can literally see the office from my window. So I spend a total of 5 hours of standing/transportation to find out my wallet is across the street. Or so I thought. That office was already closed for the day on Wednesday when I got back, so I had to wait until Thursday to get in contact with them. Luckily, my gut told me to call to make sure it was there before I went and waited in line...good thing too, no sign of my wallet. They have zero record of it ever coming in, and the reference number I was given at the police station doesn't match any of their records. So I suppose my wallet is somewhere in oblivion along with the socks that disappear in dryers and office pens that always seem to walk away. So yeah, last week wasn't very fun.