Near miss
I left my bag in a taxi on the way home from the airport. Inside were my laptop and all my identification documents.
I called the taxi company. The woman on the line carefully walked me through every detail of the ride: when it started and ended, how much the fare was, how I paid, everything. It was probably not the first time she'd handled a call like this. She said she'd check and call me back in a few minutes.
She asked for the taxi number, but I couldn't remember it. I told her I could probably recognize the driver if I saw him again, so I decided to head back to the airport.
While I was waiting for another taxi, she called. They had found the driver, but he insisted there was no bag in the car.
I called him myself. Same answer. He hadn't seen anything.
All kinds of random thoughts started racing through my mind, and my anxiety was through the roof. I have another trip coming up soon, and I was already thinking about replacing all my IDs, canceling my travel, and figuring out how to survive in the next 24 hours without a laptop.
My laptop is encrypted and the important data is backed up to the cloud, so I wasn't worried about losing the data itself. But replacing the machine would still cost me at least a day, and I have deadlines I can't easily move.
Then, while I was still on the phone with the driver, the taxi company called again. I could immediately hear the relief and excitement in the woman's voice.
"We found the right driver. He has your bag."
I've rarely felt so relieved. My whole family erupted in cheers, as if we just won the lottery =)
It turned out the first driver was a collision. He had picked up another passenger from the airport, dropped them off near my place, and even got paid exactly the same amount, including the tip! What are the odds?
There's no grand lesson here. I just wanted to share some positive news and say thank you to the kind strangers who went out of their way to help. Today could have ended very differently.
It was VinaSun. I'll be a customer for life.
Oh! My English is very terrible - Near miss is not mean “beside a beautifull girl”
You should send this to NPR’s “Unsung hero”. Many years ago in HCMC I left a Bose Quiet Comfort in an Uber car (when Uber was still operating there). The Uber support was able to locate the driver very easily but I had to wait for a whole day to get the headphone back despite offering to pay the driver the full fare for the ride to bring it to me from wherever he was. In the end, I gave him a hefty sum anyway. In another incident, I left my only phone in a Xanh SM car on a ride to the airport in HCMC. I found another Xanh SM car just dropping off a passenger and asked him to contact the company’s support center. There was little information I could give the lady about the car in which I left my phone but somehow she was able to locate it. The driver just parked at the airport after dropping me off waiting for the next passenger to take back into the city. I got my phone back without any trouble.