Here's a call I don't get every day:
I get this call from this woman and she says she has a survey instrument for sale. She says it's in a backpack. I asked her how she got it and she says it was on the side of the road and her and her friend drove by it several times and finally stopped and picked it up.
She said she talked to other surveyors she saw on the road and they said it wasn't theirs. She said she tried to find who had left it there and no one has claimed it.
I told her to look up LSAW.org and see if she could find a place to post it...
?ÿ
I would have been tempted to have her drop it by the office where I would have gained her contact information if a reward was issued or a police report prepared. I also would have posted the particulars to the LSAW and spent a few moments calling around to dealers and potential owners that I know. You could have become the hero or at least the detective.?ÿ
A few years ago I was getting a new set of tires at the tire shop.?ÿ One of the guys that worked there saw an orange TS box in the back and asked about it.?ÿ I opened it up and he immediately recognized it as something very similar to what he had found on the side of the?ÿroad a few months?ÿearlier.?ÿ He knew it was something technical and probably expensive.?ÿ He just wanted to see if he could find out to whom it belonged.
I asked him to bring it?ÿup to the shop the next day and I'd drop by and look at it.?ÿ Sure enough it was a SET4 in a case and complete with all the goodies like it had just come from the factory.?ÿ I wrote down the SN and called a local dealer to tell him the story and gave him the name and number of the guy at the tire shop.?ÿ That was all I heard for a while.
The guys at the tire shop et lunch at the local diner and?ÿI saw them a few weeks later.?ÿ The guy that had found the TS was a little upset as to?ÿwhat had transpired.
The TS had been in an engineering outfit's van that had been stolen almost a year earlier.?ÿ A rep from the insurance company showed up at the tire shop with a the local police and were all over the guy about where he got it.?ÿ He was a little PO'd.?ÿ Apparently the van had been recovered but none of the equipment had been.?ÿ He gladly turned the TS over to the insurance rep?ÿ but was a little disgruntled at being accused of being a part of something nefarious...
?ÿ?ÿ
Doesn't every company have contact info on their cases and/or instruments so an honest finder would know who to call?
Good point, we do, but only started doing that from a couple of years ago, when I lost a DC (and subsequently recovered it by calling it and fortunately the finder answered - though not before they'd fired up the www and given FB and other sites a good workout). I'm not sure why we didn't have names/numbers on our gear before that - maybe it was to do with resale value, or maybe privacy?
We always have. We had some very small plastic tags printed - the type that go on electrical equipment to show it has had a safety check. They are about 2cm x 1cm and have name, address, telephone on them. They are quite readable. One goes prominently on each bit of gear (including targets, baseplates, batteries (but not cables) and one gets put somewhere hidden on the underside or inside a cover, back of the prism socket on a target, etc. Since then we have rarely had anything stolen and only once has something (prism unit) not been returned as "found".
