Uber's Lost & Found: the Weird and Wonderful

Ever lost your phone, ring or key in an Uber ride? Well, if you’ve ever beaten yourself up about your carelessness, don’t. According to the Uber Lost & Found Index, those are the top three most commonly left-behind items in Ubers, so you’re far from being the only absent-minded one.

The other items rounding up the top ten - from glasses/sunglasses to chargers - are nothing surprising. But the more interesting list in the Index is the “most unique” forgotten items (The Economist pointed out the grammatical error - or if we want to put it more precisely, modifying an absolute - but decided to overlook it…thus, so shall we, because we are just a motoring blog). The ones that amused us were: lobster (no! not the dinner!); bulletproof vest (where was the rider heading to? And did he survive?!); Crime & Punishment (the book, not the act) and an Elf cut-out (someone with a kinky fantasy, we’d like to think).

There are more reports of stolen items on the weekend - more on Sunday than Saturday, followed by Friday. With no further evidence to suggest why, we blame all the hard drinking and partying - perhaps there are more than phones, rings and keys that people are trying to forget.

Uber also revealed that the “most forgetful day” in 2016 (can days forget? Okay, we’ll let that slide too) was 30 October. We did not know of that being a special day, except the day before Halloween, so we employed our most reliable research method called Googling to discover that it was the Devil’s Night or Mischief’s Night, depending on whether you are in Michigan or New Jersey. Even so, there is nothing special about that night except in the past, there was a rise in vandalism and other petty crimes. So, there is probably no particular nor interesting reason why people were most forgetful on this day – simply a coincidence.

Brides-to-be should take note that there is a big spike in left-behind wedding dresses on Sundays but it could be that the brides were tired out after the wedding on Saturday. If you’re riding in an Uber on a Wednesday, there is a higher probability that you will forget your notebook and on Friday, your briefcase…but haven’t we all wished that we could just chuck work completely away at the end of a workweek?

For the full details, see the Uber Lost & Found Index.