Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

A couple of years ago my parents were picking me (and probably Christina, though I can’t remember some details) up from skiing. At the base of the stairs to the parking lot was a fallen pair of goggles. Although the right thing to do would have been to turn them in to lost and found, my mother and I probably walked past, commenting apathetically about what a shame it was that someone lost his* goggles. My step-father, though, saw it as his gain, and he took the goggles. I’m not sure how he justified that to himself; my mother and I couldn’t believe he’d do such a thing. After all, those goggles belonged to someone else, and what if the person realized it and came back searching for them in vain? My mother and I, in later conversations of the found/stolen goggles, agreed that his taking them bothered us so much because either of us—especially me—could easily have been in the former owner’s position.

Last Tuesday at 2am I realized that my trusty TI 83 Plus (I never did upgrade to an 89) was not in my bag. It’s never anywhere else, and since I’d used it in my NatSci lab earlier that day, I knew it had to be either there or in someone else’s possession. There was nothing to be done at that hour, though, so I went to sleep, planning to go back to the lab to check for it before work on Wednesday. So I went back to the Silver Center the next morning and up to the lab room, but it was locked, and apparently no security guard in the building has keys to those rooms. Significantly more upset now that my plan was failing, I decided to call in late to work and wait around for the lab to open up at 9. When it did, the man with the keys—he might have been a kind of supervising TA or at least one with power, but he didn’t seem old enough to be a professor—said he hadn’t found any TI 83s. He opened a drawer and looked at the most recently lost calculators, one of which, he said, belonged to a girl and was lost just last week.

Then he went to another drawer, one filled with calculators. He picked up one, checked to make sure there was no name in it, replaced its batteries, and handed it to me, saying something along the lines of “so many people lose these calculators and never come back to claim them.” So I’ve basically adopted this orphaned calculator.

As I made my way through the park I couldn’t help thinking about possible scenarios involving kids and their lost calculators. Perhaps a student left his calculator because he was in a hurry to catch a train somewhere, and as he was rushing down the subway stairs he slipped and landed at the bottom with all of his bones broken. Naturally the kid would have to stay home in bed and wouldn’t be able to search for a missing calculator, and what if he didn’t have any friends or acquaintances who would be willing to retrieve it for him? And now I’ve gone and taken the calculator from this immobile, friendless kid. Thoughts like this kept plaguing me, so I came up with these justifications:

1. The calculator must have been there for a long time. The man who gave it to me would not give away the calculator that was lost only a week before, so mine must have been lost a while ago.
2. There is no name in it. Even if someone came back, he would never know whether the calculator he received was his or not.
3. I looked for my calculator. I was back at that building at 8am the next day. Surely if someone had looked for the calculator I now have, he would have found it.
4. My calculator now belongs to someone else. The number of calculators out there is still the same. Besides, there is a possibility that my original calculator is now in the hands of the person whose calculator I have.
5. I have almost exhausted all possible fates of my calculator. Tomorrow I will check with my other lab partner, and if the calculator is not in his possession, then I will accept that I am not likely to see it again. (Of course, if he does happen to have it, I’ll return the one from lost and found.)

I know that my reasons for accepting the calculator don’t fully negate my being a hypocrite, but what else can I do? This calculator might just have sat in the drawer until TI 83s become obsolete, never to be used again. At least with me it serves a purpose.

*The appropriate female word should follow an “or” here and in several other cases; to prevent overly-garbled sentences, I left that out.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 31st, 2005 at 11:45am and is filed under Personal, College, New York. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.