It's a shame that life doesn't have a control-F command to track down things that are lost -- not just misplaced, but truly lost.
Such items used to disappear into a lost-and-found oblivion. Nowadays oblivion is melding boundaries with the Internet, as orphaned goods increasingly find their way to online auctions or sales at sites like Unclaimed Baggage.
For the most part, it's high-bidders keepers, losers weepers. But every so often, with the broad scope of the Internet and a little bit of serendipity, something ends up in the hands of the original owner.
In March 2000, a Japanese all-girl punk rock band called ex-Girls landed in San Francisco for the beginning of an American tour. In the jumble of luggage, instruments and jet lag, a custom-made Fernandes bass guitar was left in a cab on the way from the airport.
"I was terribly, terribly shocked," the band member who owned the guitar, who goes by the name Kirilo, wrote in an e-mail note. But she did not report the loss to the police, and she never expected to see the guitar again.
Last month, Tom OKeefe of Hemet, California, was browsing Property Room (www.propertyroom.com), which auctions off lost, seized or stolen goods gathered by 30 law enforcement agencies, when he found a white Fernandes bass guitar described as "one HOT instrument!" Curious, he sent an e-mail to the site, asking for more details. A service representative responded that there was no model number and that the only identifying mark was an engraving of "XGirl Kirilo" on the back.
Thinking that the engraving might be a brand of guitar, he searched the Fernandes Web site for the term. He came up empty-handed, but after he typed the term into a search engine, he landed on the ex-Girls Web page. He notified the band about the guitar after he figured out what must have happened -- the bass had made its way to the San Francisco Police Department before ending up at the Property Room site.
Kirilo quickly got in touch with Property Room and identified the bass guitar as hers. It is now in the hands of the the ex-Girls' American tour manager, and Kirilo expects to be reunited with it soon. The bidding had reached US$125, but Kirilo said the guitar was priceless because it had been customized for her.
"It's incredible that we have the Internet and these very kind people using it, too," Kirilo wrote.
Property Room is a start-up whose management and advisory board include a number of former police officers, among them Daryl Gates, the former Los Angeles police chief. The site is essentially an aggregated online version of conventional police auctions, which sell off goods gathered by seizure, through legal forfeiture or as evidence in criminal cases.
The San Francisco Police Department, for example, takes in about 3,000 items a month, and unclaimed goods are eventually sold off. Last year such auctions brought the department US$30,000.
Since last month, the department has been unloading such goods exclusively through Property Room. Proceeds from items under US$1,000 are split equally between the Web site and the police department; on bigger-ticket items, the department gets 75 percent. Since signing on with the site, the San Francisco police are on pace to double last year's auction revenue, according to Lieutenant Thomas Buckley, who is in charge of the department's property control division.
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