Bus drivers find A brown mouse and her seven babies, two kittens in a paper sack, and a turtle and her egg. Add "a partridge in a pear tree," and it sounds like a new version of the holiday jingle. But for Oahu Transit Services lost-and-found clerk Chris Moniz, it's a list of the cuter items found on city buses.
wild, crazy things
Items including mice,
Did you lose something? By Rod Antone
kittens, dentures and
even a 2-year-old child
have been found
Star-Bulletin"There was that little 2-year-old girl that went joy riding on the bus a couple of years ago," says Moniz. "She wasn't abandoned, but someone did turn her into lost and found. I don't know if she counts."
Not everything found on the bus is cute and cuddly. In fact, sometimes it's downright jaw-dropping. Literally.
"How can you lose dentures?" says lost-and-found clerk Leila Keawe-Aiko. "What are you doing in back of the bus?"
Whatever passengers are doing, it's keeping their minds occupied as they walk off the bus, causing them to forget things they had brought aboard.TheBus lost-and-found clerks estimate they collect more than 800 items a month, from the mundane -- backpacks, skateboards, blueprints, jewelry and books -- to the bizarre.
Take a certain cooler of unknown origin that spent a week in the lost-and-found department before someone was brave enough to peek under the lid. Inside was an assortment fish parts, mostly guts resembling "dried pieces of rope." The smell was so bad that when workers threw the contents away in a nearby trash bin, someone called police saying it smelled like a dead body.
Perhaps the most unusual find by bus operators was a week's worth of stool samples. Keawe-Aiko says the samples were likely headed for a doctor's office.
"I felt bad for whoever it was," Keawe-Aiko says. "It was in individual cups, labeled and everything. Probably took a lot of hard work."
Lost-and-found clerks work hard as well, trying to find the owners of thousands of watches, wallets, cell phones and umbrellas every year.
"Crutches, dentures, drugs, thousands of dollars worth of yen -- we see it all," according to OTS Director of Operations J. Roger Morton.
"We keep things around for a month, then we end up giving things to charity, or, if the item is not too valuable, we let the employee who found it have first dibs on it."
Keawe-Aiko adds: "Sometimes we have to play detective to try and find the people who lost it. A lot of times someone's Blockbuster card is the only ID in their wallet, and we track them down through there."
With lost beepers, finding the owner is a lot easier, says Moniz. "Sometimes I have someone's (lost) beeper on my desk, and it will beep when someone calls. Then I call that person back and say, 'Who did you just call? This is the bus company, and your friend just lost their beeper.' Usually that works."
Earlier this month, someone turned in a picture of Hollywood legend Jayne Mansfield along with some other black-and-white photographs.
OTS officials say they are doing their best to find out who the pictures belong to.
"What may not mean anything to one person may be very valuable to another, so we do what we can," says OTS marketing manager Marilyn Dicus.
Some of the larger items left on the buses include bicycles. Recent improvements to the bus include the storage of up to two bicycles above the front grill. Moniz says registered bicycles have a much better chance of making it back to their owners.
While it's possible to see how someone could walk off the bus and forget their bike, how anyone could leave behind their crutches and wheelchairs remains a mystery to the clerks.
"I guess the bus has magical healing powers," says Morton.
If you've lost something on TheBus, you can call 848-4445. Be prepared to provide information such as the time and date that you lost your item as well as which bus you believe you were on when you last had it. Lose it?