My boyfriend once left his backpack on the floor of the Rideau Centre (big mall in downtown Ottawa) food court, containing his MacBook Pro, fancy Sony headphones, and several expensive university textbooks. Probably $3000-$4000 total, plus countless notes, in-progress term papers, a half-programmed app, & our sweet Minecraft world file (I know we're shit ok). An amazing, kind member of the custodial crew picked it up and turned it in. So this story is kind of on her behalf here.

We had just finished class and he had to buy a suit for a family wedding, so we grabbed some fast food for dinner. He was tired and left his bag on the floor under the table. He realized after about twenty minutes and he immediately sprinted out of the store, told me he'd be back ASAP. Texted me five minutes later saying his bag was gone, and he was in full panic mode. We looked under probably 50% of the tables in the massive Rideau Centre foodcourt. We asked Lost and Found and gave them both of our phone numbers. We went into every single store we'd browsed in, and searched + asked the salespeople if they'd seen anything. A few salespeople told us good luck, but that bag was toast; apparently the Rideau Centre was experiencing a lot of thefts lately. I figured it would be a good idea to ask the food court custodial staff if they had seen anything while cleaning, but my boyfriend figured it was a lost cause, pretty dejected at this point, didn't want to bother any more staff. I went up and asked a guy, he radioed his supervisor, and turns out, some saint from the cleaning crew had turned it in 5 minutes after we left the food court. One manager from the cleaning crew took us to lost and found and reamed out the lost property lady; either the lost property lady had forgotten to write it down, or was hoping for a new laptop. We thanked everybody about a million times and if I ever see either of those two women again, I'm going to buy them lunch.

You know when you end up finding something you've lost, that was very expensive? Or when your laptop breaks, but it turns out it was only a $100 repair instead of the $1000 one you thought it was going to be? And for an hour, you feel like the richest man in the world? That was him after he found his bag. Bought us both $6 hot chocolates at Nordstrom and paid for an Uber home. (And yes we are both now absolutely religious about always keeping a foot hooked into our backpack's straps, or keeping it on the table, so we don't have any chance of forgetting them)