TKOG who … tracks you down for your own good

NTKOG #69: The kind of aggressively good samaritan who, upon finding some small wrong in the world, goes an extra step or two to MAKE THINGS RIGHT.

I am: a good person.

I am not: a great person, probably. In the grand ledger of People Who Do Good, I’m listed after Gandhi for reasons other than the purely alphabetical.

The Scene: Outside The Tap in Fanueil Hall, somewhat buzzed after a night drinkin’ and (but not dancin’) with Sister and some of her friends. We hail a cab back to Brookline, and as we tumble in, a piece of plastic jabs my thigh. By the light of my cell phone, I see it’s a debit card belonging to a girl who has a semi-common name.

“Let’s rip it up!” said Sister, tipsily attempting to shred the card with her bare hands.

“Should we try to return it?” I asked.

“We could if it were a driver’s license, but there’s no address,” she said. Correct me if I’m wrong, but does that sound like a challenge?! I pocketed the card, then the cabbie’s foot went leaden and my memory the rest of the drive home fades into a whirling vortex of motion sickness.

After we got to Sister’s place (and before preparing a requisite batch of drunken cookie dough), I pulled out my laptop and facebooked the name on the card. Seven candidates. To each of them, I shot the following missive:

“re: lose a debit card?

Did you happen to lose a debit card in a cab in Boston late tonight (Saturday)? If so, I think I found it, and would love to send it to you if you can confirm it’s yours by letting me know what bank it’s for!”

Friendly enough, right? In a more sober state it would have occurred to me that mentioning mailing the card might be read as a phishing attempt to gain the owner’s ZIP code, and I probably should have just offered to shred it, but, hey, I was working under terse circumstances.

Forty-eight hours, only one of the candidates answered my message, and did so, I think, with the most nonsensical of all possible replies:

“sorry i don’t take cabs”

Um, okay? One thinks that an update on whether your debit card is actually in your possession MIGHT BE MORE GERMANE TO THE ISSUE. Sort of parries aside the main thrust of the message, what?

After the period of silence, I figured that either I didn’t connect with the girl via facebook (weird! i thought all drinkin’-night card losers are of facebook age!) or she’d already reported the card stolen and didn’t want to bother. Either way, called the number on the back of the card to report it lost, then confettied it with Sister’s kitchen shears.

The Verdict: Good deed attempted; nothing lost by it, at any rate. Isn’t it funny, though, how sometimes when you try your darnedest to do the right friggin’ thing, the universe is totally unamused? Obviously it’s still worth it to always try — and this was a nice reminder to me to be more proactive in attempting to leave the world a bit better than I found it — but, y’know, I guess in this case there just wasn’t much to be gained. Except information about a fellow Bostonian’s cab-riding habits.

Tagged as: boston, cab, do the right thing, every bostonian i've met tells me "omg no one but tourists drink at fanueil hall" then turns around and DRINKS THERE ANYWAY, facebook, fanueil hall, good samaritan, karma, private transportation, ps: the cookie dough was delicious, saintlike behavior, taxi