It may surprise some to learn that New York is the most forgetful city when it comes to ride shares. So says Uber, which has released its ninth annual Lost & Found Index — a hilarious, surprising and occasionally gross list of stuff riders left behind in cars last year. (Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., were close behind New York in obliviousness.)
In reporting the data, the San Francisco ride-share behemoth also noted that it was doing so just as the planet Mercury was coming out of retrograde, a time astrologers claim has an effect on forgetting.
On April 5 alone, more than 7,000 riders reported lost items last year.
“Things get glitchy” during a Mercury retrograde, said Quinn Cox, an author and astrologer based in Provincetown, Mass. That explains the April number, but there was no clear cosmic rationale for why people lost the most things on Oct. 26, according to Uber’s report, than on any other day of the year, he added, “although that is Hillary Clinton’s birthday.”
Volume may be a factor in the quantity of losses suffered by New Yorkers. Possibly, too, there is the stress of congestion fares to consider or the demands of living in a demanding and absurdly expensive metropolis.
Yet people everywhere misplace their belongings in ride-shares and they do so with surprising specificity, according to data assembled by Uber. It may help to know when leaving the house on Mondays that you are likelier to lose your gloves in a ride-share on that day than any other. Tuesdays, it’s jackets. Wednesdays are medicine. Mind your umbrella if you happen to hail an Uber on Thursday or Friday. On Saturdays, hold on to your cowboy hat.
Why debit card losses peak on Sundays is destined to remain a mystery — as is so much about the Uber Lost & Found index. Never mind how passengers forget such items: Why do passengers board a vehicle with a urinal, a turtle, a chain saw or a mannequin head with human hair?
Where are riders headed, with things like 15 hookahs, a taxidermied rabbit or a Viking drinking horn?
“From wayward mannequin heads to live lobsters, Uber riders have left behind some truly unforgettable items this year,” said Camiel Irving, Uber’s vice president of operations and general manager of mobility for the United States and Canada, in a statement.
Reached by phone at her office in San Francisco, Ms. Irving added that, given the “billions of Uber trips” riders take yearly, things would inevitably go astray. “I recently left a Bottega Veneta wallet” in an Uber, Ms. Irving said. “You can imagine there was a little bit of stress with that.” Retrieving the item was easy, she added: “A quick text in the app and I just had to step out of a meeting briefly, which I was more than happy to do.”
There is little likelihood that Uber drivers themselves (least of all the 80,000 or so in New York represented by the Independent Drivers Guild) can forget some of the many unsavory items passengers carry and leave. Who could — when a stranger somehow inadvertently abandons a five-gallon bucket of beans or 175 hamburger sliders or a Bojangles chicken tender combo platter or a carton of melting Sunny Delight ice cream in your car?
“I’ve had two sets of glasses today, headphones, keys, phones,” said Diston Salina, 29, an Uber driver for the past nine years who was asked about missing items during a recent ride. “One time I had lost wallets back to back,” he said.
While occasionally unnerved by lost items (“Once, some people in the Bronx left pocketknives and I was, like, Whoa.”), Mr. Salina more typically takes ride-share flotsam in stride.
“People leave liquor, beer, good bottles of wine,” he added. “Believe me, they’re calling me for that.”
The extent to which potables figure on the Lost & Found Index suggests that many Uber riders may be in fuzzy frames of mind even before they thumb-tap their destinations on the app. An at-random inventory of beverages found in Uber cars last year — a gallon bottle of Grey Goose, for example; a case of White Claw; or a fifth of Remy Martin cognac in a bag with some Mr. Pure Peach lemonade — amounts either to a boozy consumer profile or a testament to the strains of 21st-century life.
Considering the sheer volume of summonses, liens, divorce papers and legal documents Uber also lists among things commonly lost in transit, Mercury hardly needs be in retrograde for riders to require a drink.
