Lost and Found

I was standing on the 4 train this morning listening to This American Life, when the doors opened at Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall and a woman rushed by me to exit the train, pulling my iPod from my jacket pocket. I watched helplessly as it slid across the grimy floor, bounced onto the platform for a brief moment and then disappeared onto the tracks below.

I remained calm and thought about the MTA public service bulletins I've seen posted on the walls of subway cars. In effect, they say something like: "If you drop something on the tracks, don't be an idiot and try to get it yourself, just contact an MTA employee and we'll help you retrieve it." Makes perfect sense to me. I always wondered what types of people would jump six feet down onto the tracks under any circumstances. Well, a fellow passenger turned to me and said "You gonna get that?" and pointed to my iPod, which was perched atop a concrete slap directly underneath the edge of the platform. "You mean, jump down there?" I replied. "Yea man, why not?" he said. While the answer seems self evident, I just replied by saying "Um, naaaah."

So anyway, I headed over to the station operator and explained what happened and she sent somebody over to shine a flashlight on my iPod. "There it is. It's in a metal case so it's probably not broken. I drop it all the time" I explained. While my aluminum case nearly doubles the girth of my iPod and cancels out all of the aesthetic appeal of the device, it really has saved it from certain destruction at least a dozen times over the past couple of years. So I'm a very practical nerd, if nothing else.

The MTA employee explained that they are no longer allowed to go onto the tracks to retrieve items, so he would have to contact somebody from the "track services department." (This new policy probably has something to do with this incident from yesterday.) He said it might take a half hour or more before they arrived, so I decided to head over to my office and check back a little bit later. Sure enough, I came back around 11:30am and my iPod was waiting for me at the station booth, completely functional, and still on the same spot of This American Life that I had been listening to when it was ripped from my jacket during my morning commute.

So there you have it, a real life tale of a lost item on the NYC subway tracks.