The dreaded moment when you pat your pocket and realise your phone is no longer there. The subsequent panic, the frantic calls, the tracing of steps. For Uber passengers, that moment often leads to a digital lost property office, and this month the company released its annual list of the strangest items left behind.
The list is a social document: a snapshot of our distracted, hurried lives. Among the chargers and wallets, there are dildos, false teeth, and a bag of live crayfish. The crayfish, presumably, were not for the journey home.
The dildo, one imagines, was a source of personal embarrassment but also a testament to the fact that we carry our private lives into public spaces. Uber's lost property process is data-light: they ask only for a description, a time, and a ride. This minimal data collection is a quiet victory for British standards of privacy.
It is a reminder that in a world of surveillance capitalism, some spaces still respect the boundary between a lost item and a lost identity. The list itself is a cultural artefact, revealing the peculiar mix of the mundane and the absurd that characterises modern life. It is a gentle satire of our own forgetfulness, a mirror held up to a society that is always on the move, always losing something.
For every iPhone there is a rubber chicken, for every laptop a prosthetic limb. The human cost is a moment of panic; the cultural shift is a slow acceptance that our possessions are as transient as our journeys.
