A few weeks ago, I did something I’ve never done in my many decades on this earth. I left my wallet at a store. Specifically, a grocery store. In the self-checkout area to be precise.
I think what happened was that I pulled my credit card out of my wallet to pay for the groceries, put the card in the credit card reader and then back in the wallet, realized that I needed to do something else (perhaps involving putting bags of goods in my backpack), put the wallet down, and forgot to pick the wallet back up when I was ready to leave.
It’s the classic story of boy meets girl, boy starts a blog, boy loses wallet, boy writes a blog post about the boy losing a wallet, girl yells at boy for being an idiot, boy acknowledges that girl is right. Classic, amiright?!
At any given moment, my wallet typically includes the following: my driver’s license, a few credit and debit cards, a library card, an insurance card, some grocery store cards, some pictures of Thing One (The Elder) and Thing Two (The Younger), and some cash. The cash is stored in two places, one of which is the wallet’s main compartment. More on location two later.
I use cash sparingly, but know sometimes ya’ just gotta have it. The cash in the the wallet’s main compartment typically amounts to $50 or less. On the rare occasions that I get down to $0, I usually replenish very quickly.
Lost and found
When I discovered that my wallet was missing, I thought there was a chance it was at the grocery store. So I called to see if it’d been found there. As luck would have it, it had. Phew. ‘Course you knew this already because I didn’t give you a spoiler alert in the first paragraph of this blog post. Because I didn’t want you hanging on tenterhooks waiting for the big reveal. You’re welcome, Dear Reader.
Anyway, back to the story.
Once I’d confirmed that the wallet was at the grocery store, I immediately hopped on my bike and rode to the store. Everything that had been in the wallet seemed to still be there. But there was no cash in the wallet’s main compartment. Although I can’t be positive, I’m pretty sure there was cash there on the day I left the wallet at the store. My best guess is about $30.
So, the good news is that I got my wallet and the most important things in it back. The bad news is that I may be about a few Hamiltons lighter.
Lesson the pain
I’m taking a few lessons from this. First, to be more mindful of my wallet when I happen to take it out of my back pocket before I am actually engaged in the act of paying.
Because I’m generally an idiot, to make sure that I don’t forget my keys (and, at home, my wallet), event tickets, and the like, I have a dummy-proofing practice that I engaged in. It almost always works. The practice is that I put items that I cannot afford to forget in a place that I have to touch before leaving the house. I always put my wallet, keys, and sunglasses in the same spot when I get home. When I’m going to a ticketed event, I place the tickets right there with the wallet, keys, and sunglasses ahead of time. Now I plan to figure out a dummy-proofing practice for when I take out my wallet outside the house.
The second lesson is to be even more conservative in terms of cash in my wallet. Sure, it was only (likely) about $30 that I may have lost this time. But it could have been more. Not a life-altering amount. but between losing $0 and losing $30 or $50, I’ll take losing $0 every time.
Secret, secret, I’ve got a secret
Another practice that I started several years ago stemmed — if my memory serves — from a time about 10-15 years ago when I had to check my coat at an event. When I went to retrieve the coat after the event, I planned to tip the coat-check person $1 for the one item, as is my standard practice. But I discovered that I had no $1 bills in my wallet. I think that I resolved the situation by putting myself in the uncomfortable position of giving the coat-check person a $10 or $20 bill, asking him or her to break it, and then left a dollar.
I felt pretty stupid.
So, that night, I put a $1 bill in a semi-hidden compartment in my wallet. A sort of insurance policy $1. It paid off once or twice.
Later, I found myself in a position where I needed something near $20 in cash for some purchase I was making, but found that I didn’t have it. So, that night, I tucked a $20 bill in with the $1 in the secret compartment. I’ve since added $10 and $5 bills in the compartment, having occasionally found that having one or both of those bills would have come in handy.
So, my wallet now has cash in two places. $X in the main wallet compartment, and $36 ($20, $10, $5, and $1 bills) in the secretish compartment. Luckily, and for reasons I’m unsure of (tho this also is the reason I think that there may not have been any cash in the main wallet compartment), the secreted-away $36 was still in the wallet.
I’ve tapped my insurance cash about 15-20 times since I started the practice. It’s one of the smartest things this dumb blogger has ever done. So for $0, this insurance policy definitely has paid off.
I recently extended this practice to include access to ‘rona masks. Because I almost always take my backpack wherever I’m going, I placed a mask in it a while back so that I’d have it wherever I went. It worked. Until it didn’t.
You see, much like the wallet incident, I took my mask out and instead of placing it back in the backpack when I stopped using it, I kept it in my pocket or left it on my face and then never put it back in the backpack. I discovered my error when I went somewhere, reached into the backpack for the mask, and found that it wasn’t there. So, when I got home, I put a second, “insurance” mask in the backpack. This way, if I forget to put my primary mask back in the backpack, I’ll have the backup to save me.
And in the end . . .
Dear Reader, do you have dummy-proofing practices that you employ? As for me, I’m really hoping that the misplaced/forgotten wallet is a one-off and not a sign of chronic memory loss.
* Apologies to Jim Wang for using as the title for this blog post the same term as the name of his excellent blog, Wallet Hacks. He did nothing to deserve being associated with this subpar rag.
