dragonlady7

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sonnetsandswingouts https://sonnetsandswingouts.tumblr.com/ replied to your post “lost and found” https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/628262219683135488/lost-and-found

Ugh, I remember that awful adrenaline hit of “wait…where’s my wallet?” and ever since that first time I’ve kept a slip of paper with my parents’ number and “in case of emergency” written on it tucked in with my license. Glad you got it back!

The last time I lost my wallet, or it got stolen, I’m not entirely sure how it left my possession, within ten minutes my bank card had been used at a liquor store and then declined at three convenience stores, and I never got any of the wallet back and that’s why I no longer have a passport card or any of the giftcards I’d had in there. We searched every trash can in the area and never found it. Filed a police report, the police got the guy’s face from the security camera on the liquor store, told me his name and approximate address, made me come back down into the city after I’d gone to bed that night hours later so I could file a statement that no, I did not know this person whose name they told me, so that they could go arrest him.

That was like two years ago, I never heard from them again and assume they never bothered arresting the guy.

Also the cops had me fill out a form so I could get my license replaced with the fee waived, but then they filled out their part of it incorrectly, so that it was not valid to get my license replaced. When they handed it to me, I looked at it and said “the checkmark’s in the wrong place, it says it was confiscated instead of stolen but it was stolen,” and the cop looked and said “ehh, it’s fine”. It wasn’t fine; the form was useless and I had to pay the fee and might as well never have filed a police report, but the DMV was 300 miles away from those cops and I knew they wouldn’t fix the form even if I did drive back there and ask them to, so.

So like, fuck cops, but also, I don’t have a lot of faith that putting a note in my wallet is going to get it returned to me any more surely than having my license with my address on it in there would.

The cop acted like I should be really upset that my personal information was so not-hard to come by but like this is 2020, it’s really easy to get doxxed. [added: also, you used to be able to just look in the phone book, it’s not like we haven’t always had directories??] I’m not super worried because if you just Google my wallet name, there are a shitload of other people with it who are either famous or historical. (Yesterday Mom told me how she’d just re-filed my probate file at the historical society, apparently I died with a contested will in 1890. There’s also a hip-hop producer and a scandalous politician. If I ever get a Wikipedia page it’ll have to have a disambiguation, which is hilarious. If you add in my middle name you get a TV character.) If you want to find me you’ve got to fill in my address or some other bit of information, and like, if you have that, you could probably find me regardless, so. I’m not that freaked-out and in this case it worked. It’s fine. If some terrible person wants to use this information to find me and do something horrible, that’s really on them because they’re a terrible person and me being harder to find isn’t going to stop them from being a terrible person. Like… at some point that’s really not about me at all, is it?

Of course I would feel differently if I were famous or notorious for some reason, but I will cross that bridge if I come to it.