The Wallet Part I: Do the Right Thing - Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad

Last updated on March 21st, 2021 at 02:57 am

I’m pretty sure that I’d benefit from a society that didn’t need wallets. For me, it’s an unnatural extension of my body that carries so many of the things I need to function “normally” in this society—so unnatural to me that I misplace it far too often.

Yesterday morning I was primed to leave for work on time—I’d packed everything I’d need for the day, made sure that all my household tasks had been completed—but then I went looking for that little leather folio that partly defines who I am…
…and it was nowhere to be found.

For any of you hyper-organized people out there who’ve never managed to lose a wallet, allow me to describe what happens when you can’t find it.

1: THE FRANTIC SEARCH

First, you try and figure out where it could have possibly gone to.

You trace your steps backward and look just about everywhere you could think of—old jackets, bags, under things—nowhere is safe as you tear your home apart searching for something you should have, but for some reason don’t.

If you’re lucky, you’ll find it. If not…

2: DO I START OVER?

This’d probably overlap with #1, but you start thinking whether you should scrap that wallet and get a new one instead. You think about the things you have in there and whether there’s any way to figure out if some ne’er-do-well has your livelihood in their possession. Do you cancel everything you have in there and go through the excruciating process of replacing everything? Or do you put a better effort out to try and find this thing?

Depends on where you think you might have lost it—if it’s in the middle of Times Square or an amusement park for example, it just might not be worth it. But if it was somewhere in your neighbourhood or some place where everybody knows who you are… then perhaps it’s time to move to Step #3!

3: CHANNEL YOUR INNER DETECTIVE

By now, you’re hopefully a lot calmer and more rational than you were when this whole mess started, because now you really need to think. You need to narrow the list of possible places that your wallet could be!
Since I knew I’d had it with me on Friday and I’d been home all day Saturday, there were only a few places that it could have gone to:

perhaps it flew out of my bag/jacket when I’d been running to catch the bus on Sunday (that never came);
perhaps I’d left it in the back seat of my friends’ car after getting out on Friday night (though I was positive I’d checked); or
maybe I’d left it at church.

With a plan in mind, I left for work, taking a few more things into consideration:

All my ID in the wallet points to my parents’ address in Mississauga, so if someone had dropped it in a mailbox, that’s where it’d likely be going
I’d left no cash in the wallet, so unless someone somehow figured out my PINs, my banking information should be safe
I’d left a stack of business cards in there in case I ever needed them!

Well if I ever needed them, now would be the time!

Luckily enough, when I got in to the office, my phone was blinking with a couple of messages from a personal trainer who’d found my wallet lying outside of a TTC station near my house!

So all’s well that ends well…

…or is it?

While I got the wallet back, it wasn’t without its share of complications—but that’s a post for tomorrow.

Come back to find out what I found out and how getting my wallet back would change my life.