Long ago, I worked in a record store, and David Byrne came in to the store to shop. He was wearing a red plastic hard hat, yet gave a disparaging look to everyone who seemed to "notice" him. When he left, I discovered he had forgotten to take his credit card from the counter. I called him (we also had a video store with contact info) and he was incredibly rude and told me just to cut it up because he couldn't be bothered to stop back in. This story has no real point, but it did make me less of a Talking Heads fan, and perhaps relates to the idea that being a good Samaritan isn't always rewarding. That said, I once had my bag stolen at a nightclub, and a few months later someone found my wallet in some bushes and mailed it to me, which was a pleasant surprise. When I've had things stolen, I've always maintained a hope that there will end up being a happy ending, even if that hasn't been the case every time.

I flew back from Palermo to Zurich on Monday. Exceptionally in business class (essentially same price).

A pretty well known German performer was also on the flight with his companion and - I assume - his favorite microphone.

The gentleman was meticulously polite, including the fact that he queued up at the gate instead of jumping the queue with about a dozen economy passengers in the queue.

Not every prominent person is an asshole.

Even prominent people can have a bad day or have other momentary hassles to deal with that might make them behave less than gracious on occasion. Trying to be generous here.

Whether you're talking about rich or poor, famous or not, educated or not - there are good and bad people.

Our instinct is to make assumptions like 'rich so asshole', and there may be correlations between some of those categories and rate of occurrence of good and bad, but the differences are small compared to the normal panoply of personality types.

Oh, that's disappointing, I've always loved David Byrne :(

The problem with a forgotten credit card is that you can't be sure if it was stolen and can be cloned, so is better to dismiss it and get a new one. Maybe he had a bad morning talking with his bank about it yet so the card was useless at this time.

As per someone else's comment, everyone can have a bad day. I try not to judge people I don't know (unless there are repeat stories, then it's hard not to).

Oh, and never read about your heroes!

Edit: just -> judge. Damn auto-correct!

> One woman tried to run from me and my husband on the assumption that we were up to no good for trying to catch her because we happened to see her drop her wallet just before she got in her car. But, obviously, we must have been muggers or something. No other explanation was possible in her mind.

When I was a little kid, I was on Crete with my mother, and at some point she asked me to watch her bag while she bought did something for a few minutes, probably buying food. So I was sitting there, with my knee on the bag, not actively watching it, I rather took in the surroundings. Some older Greek farmer type guy started to point at the bag, trying to get my attention, and I thought he wanted to remind me to really "watch" the bag, being a patronizing adult. No other explanation was possible in my mind. So without really looking at him or the bag, I was like "I know, it's fine, I got this, leave me alone". He did after a short while.

When my mother returned, she noticed the pomegranate the man had placed on the bag.. which is what he had pointed at. I was so ashamed.

Back in '96 or '97 i found a pager dropped on the ground (they were pretty expensive back then), it was at night so i took it and called the lost and found number on the back. I was on the phone for about an hour and finally got to someone who gave me an address to mail it back to. I was in college and literally eating ramen noodles, i told them i was not getting a box and paying to mail it back. The person on the phone was rude and agreed to send a prepaid box to mail it back in.

That was over an hour of my life wasted and the company didn't seem to be grateful, hopefully the owner was...I will return things if found, just a bit more jaded about it.

I am 56 years old. I have never found a wallet or a debit card except one I found a card in a restaurant where I just hand it to a server.

Lost one at a Metro ca. 1986, had it returned.

Dropped a credit card at TSA checkin a year ago, had it pointed out by the person behind me.

Found an out-of-state drivers' license a couple of years ago while running, got in touch through LinkedIn, handed it off at a Starbucks the next day.

Found a wallet at a Starbucks within the last year, called the guy at the business card number, left it at the front desk of my building.

But then I have the advantage of you by eight years...

I've found 2 and lost 1 in 49 years. But you'd need more than a couple data points to suggest anything. Let's at least require p<0.05 before suggesting something is "odd".

Presumably a homeless person spends more time than you do in the places where people lose things than a non homeless person.

Ive both once lost and found a debit card in an ATM.

The one I found was left in a drive thru on a Saturday morning. The branch was open, so I walked in and dropped it off. I have no idea what the bank did after that.

I once left mine at an ATM, the bank cancelled the card and issued a new one before I even realized I'd left it behind.

But how? Doesn't the ATM eat it up if you don't take it in 30s or so?

Some do (that happened to mine when I forgot it once, bank called me). Others do not. The best ones require that you take your card before they do the thing you wanted it to do (as a measure to ensure you don't forget your card).

This drove me mad when moving to Canada. In Germany all the ATMs require you to take the card to get the cash, in Canada it was the opposite. I lost my card twice that way. Design is so important.

It’s like this in the US as well, and I didn’t know the possible difference in order of operations before you brought it up. I would think stuff like this would be written down in a best practice / licensing document somewhere in order to even sell ATMs.

Edited: Added “up” after “brought it”.

Sadly no, there's very often tricks to correctly designing routine things in life that not everybody responsible has thought about and this can have dire consequences. Every "push" door with prominent "pull" handles is a miniature example.

Modern railway trains use electronically controlled doors. Rather than needing a team of people to run along checking every door on the train is closed and locked, or just hoping nobody falls out of a moving train, the doors are powered and when instructed will close and lock. The doors can't close instantly of course and so the procedure will be that the guard or driver presses a button, there's a brief warning period and then doors try to close and lock, once all doors are successfully closed and locked you're clear to drive the train away.

In the UK it turns out that there were two ways to implement this functionality, some train manufacturers used one, some the other. One way goes like this, when the button is pressed:

1. "Door Open" buttons for passengers are disabled 2. All open doors sound an alarm (typically fast bleeping) 3. Wait a few seconds 4. All doors that are still open try to close

The other way goes like this:

1. All open doors sound an alarm 2. Wait a few seconds 3. "Door Open" disabled 4. Try to close any open doors

This second order feels pretty similar, it's likely only a few geeks even noticed it was different and nobody made a big fuss about it. Until there was an accident and then the accident investigators discovered it.

A passenger realised very late that they were at their destination, unknown to them when they pressed "Door Open" in fact the train's crew had just told the system to close all doors for departure and it was in that waiting period. On their train, the "Open" buttons were not disabled during that period. Now the passenger's door was open, but it had missed that "alarm" phase, so there was no warning anything was amiss. The passenger tried to step through the door, but at that moment the timer expired and the door closed on them, trapping IIRC an article of clothing and resulting in a dragging accident when the train departed.

All affected trains needed revised firmware to enforce the correct order of events now that it was apparent to everybody that there even _was_ a correct order of events.

This is why I recommend all software engineers to read The Design of Everyday things. These basic design principles are helpful in designing UIs, APIs and architecture.

The thing with doors for me is that I feel “trapped” when I have a door with no place for my hands besides a panel that lies flat (does not extend outward) from the door. The first time I saw one I was very confused: it seemed to me that I was against a wall that was painted as a door, but had no handles. It was surprising to me that specific example it was brought up as an example of good user interface design in my university UI class.

Your account of the train incident is heart-breaking, but further solidifies my desire to have mandatory best practices that are evidence-based and have sufficient consensus for user interfaces that have harmful failure modes. On top of these best practices, there also needs to be a ramp plan from the any status quo interface that is nonconformant to the final version through as many intermediate designs as necessary to deal with ingrained user behaviour and ingrained user expectations.

Depends on the company, they're mostly developed independently. I know that RBC ATMs require you to take back your card before dispensing cash.

I can't remember which places do it which way, but I have walked off with my card and without the cash I withdrew when I used an ATM that gave the card back first (I was used to the other way round).

The ATM can (don't all?) take the money back if not picked up in 30s, and cancel the transaction.

I live in Germany, where ATMs always require you to take out the card before giving you money. The reason I've heard for this is to avoid a particular scam that goes like this:

1. Eve spies on Alice as she enters her PIN into the ATM.

2. As Alice takes her money, Eve taps her on the shoulder and gives her a 10$ bill, explaining that it fell down to the floor when Alice didn't notice.

3. Mallory uses the distraction to swipe Alice's card from the ATM without her noticing. Now Mallory and Eve have both the card and the PIN and can empty the account.

The UK does this and I always figured it was to prevent you from forgetting your card and leaving it in the ATM.

Yes, ATMs nowadays wait for you to remove the card (start beeping if you don't) and won't produce the cash unless you've done so. But there could be ATMs on less-prone banks or just by other companies that just "sell cash" (and charge a fee) that are not so caring.

This was a while ago, and Things have changed since I've had my ATM eaten. Now, they do not dispense cash until the card has been removed.

I found a wallet in a train earlier this year. I dropped it into the office at the station.

I like the library as proxy return idea.

I've tried to return stuff via my police precinct. Couldn't be bothered.

I once returned a wallet via a "I Saw You" style personal ad in our local arts paper. (One of his frat brothers saw the ad and posted it on his door. Result!)

I've returned a few phones. Because they've been locked, I had to wait until someone calls (answer) or texts it (quickly write down number, then use my own phone to call back).

Phones need a "I found this lost phone" feature on the lock screen.

Android has that, you just have to turn it on in settings (which no one does). Maybe it should be part of first-time setup.

In some Landmark course, many years ago, our homework included giving $1 to one random person every day, and recording what happened. As I recall, maybe 50% of people wouldn't take it, at least at first.

This was, of course, mainly an exercise in sharing Landmark.

In major cities, I've been burned so many times with people trying to grab my attention for some agenda or other, usually to sell me something or peddle some wierd conspiracy, or both. I'm afraid I'd be one of the people who wouldn't take your dollar.

Out in the country, I'd likely be more receptive.

That's the problem with cities. Such high population density, so many people fighting for your attention. You have to ignore the people around you to some degree to get anything done. It's far too easy to just completely switch off after a while