Police vs Facebook

The weather was hotter than hot and Dave chose to go for a bike ride.  He overdid it and came home with legs of jelly and a couple of other things too: a passport and a pair of sunglasses.

He found these in woods near Shenfield Common and that's a strange place to find a passport.  He looked around for a body because you never know.  (He didn't find one.)

When he got home we discussed what to do with the passport.

In "the old days" you'd take it to the police station, but these days that's less of an option.  The police station isn't always open, in fact I don't know what the opening hours are so I don't bother to try and hand anything in anymore.  Even if I were to look up the opening times I can guarantee there won't be any parking space near the station so the incentive to "bother" is small.  The last thing that I found was a beautiful silver earring.  I drove round to the police station four times before I gave up.  The earring is now somewhere in Dagenham because I left it in my car and it was still in the car when it was returned to the Ford Car Conditioning Centre in Dagenham.  They called me to tell me I'd left an earring in the car and I said they could keep it.  Somebody, somewhere, has lost an earring.  My only consolation when I think about my inability to reunite her with the earring is that she will have experienced the same trouble I did trying to visit the police station so she will have probably given up too.

In a passport there are no contact details for the passport holder.  There is a space for emergency contact details but this isn't always completed.  In our discovered passport there were emergency contact details but just a first name and an address.  This could have been an ex-girlfriend so we decided it would be wrong to pop round an hand over the passport, especially as the passport holder was quite young and likely to have young friends who might change address regularly.

We looked for our passport holder in the phone book but this contains the billpayer's details and only BT customers who aren't ex-directory. It's a lot slimmer than the phone book I remember from childhood too.

I thought it might be worth checking Facebook.  We did a search and found someone with the same name and date of birth.  Bizarrely we had a mutual friend.  I sent a Facebook message and, as a result, he will be collecting his passport and sunglasses tomorrow.  Good job too as he goes on holiday in a fortnight.

Police 0, Facebook 1.