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A bit of a shot in the dark
By Kaz on Fri, 01/01/2010 - 3:27am
Over the Christmas vacation, I rented a black/grey Toyota Corolla (MA tag: 466 GX8) from the Budget Rental on Brighton Ave in Allston in order to visit my family in Maryland and return to Boston in time to celebrate New Year's Eve with friends in town.
I returned to town late on Wednesday night and unloaded my Christmas gifts and then took the car to the rental agency on the morning of 12/31/09. That afternoon, I came to realize I had left one of my boxes in the car's backseat.
The rental agency had closed its doors at 3 PM and I was too late to contact them about possibly retrieving my item and they won't open until Saturday morning to find out if they'd perhaps found it in the car.
In the meantime, the national customer service number let me know that the car had been rented out again until 1/2/2010...so if the rental office had not seen the box either, then it may be in the hands of the new renter who now has the car. If you or anyone you know has rented a black/grey Corolla from Budget in Allston for the New Year weekend, please let me know. If it turns out on Saturday that Budget has found my package, then I'll ask Adam to delete this post.
Thanks for any help anyone can give me on this. I know this post is quite the shot in the dark, long shot, rare chance...but I really hope that the package can make its way safely back to me this holiday season. It would mean a lot to me.
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Comments
My wife and I found a wallet
My wife and I found a wallet in a rental car once. As soon as we found it we contacted the rental company. Turns out it was from the renter 2 people before us!
I wish you the best of luck on getting your package back.
2010 idea
Adam,
Please don't delete this post even if the box is found. I dislike the idea of arbitrarily deleting posts from a NEWS blog. I would much rather see updates and corrections than deletions of posts.
Thank you,
Andy
I beg to differ, please
I beg to differ, please delete. This is not news and has no business on a news blog. This isn't a digital lost and found.
The return of the tough crowd
Kaz's post doesn't bother me in the least, for several reasons:
He's a regular here (that alone means something, at least to me).
It's not like we're flooded with lost-and-found posts - and if we were, the answer would be to set up a lost-and-found area on the site.
Sure, it's a remote chance, but the idea that a UH reader might actually be driving that car and that owner and package might be reunited, is kind of cool.
and he didn't call the rental agency because?
His phone broken or something?
Also, did it occur to him that his wallet has his ID in it, with his address?
Well if you had bothered
to read what he wrote, he said by the time he realized he had left the box(not his wallet by the way),they had closed and wouldn't open until Saturday.
did you read his post? the
did you read his post? the place was called until saturday, so he called the national office of the agency. That sounds like using his phone to gain some knowledge.
We'll see in the morning
Thanks for having my back on this, Adam. Unfortunately, I've heard nothing from any of the feelers I put out like this post.
As others have said, it wasn't my wallet; it was a box that did not have anything on it that indicated it was mine or how to contact me. Also, I did call both the local and national customer service numbers. I even went to the location and left them my name, number, and situation on a letter and dropped it in their off-hour return dropbox. I feel I had fully exhausted *every* other possibility before posting this. I've seen some very random anecdotes of people being connected through local websites/forums, blogs, Twitter, etc. If the same could have worked to my favor in this case, I figured I had to take the chance, knowing that nothing I posted here couldn't also easily be deleted if need be.
Since I learned from the national agency that the car had been rented for 12/31 to 1/2, I was really hoping the car had stayed fairly local and it would just be a matter of one person knowing about a situation similar to mine from a friend who just happened to find a box in their rental car. I guess I'll see tomorrow morning as to whether the rental agency found it or if the returning vehicle's renter hands it over if it remained in the car...or if it's simply "gone", which I recognize is the likeliest probability.
Resolution
Well, the rental company told me today that neither they nor the woman who rented the car after me and returned it today saw any box in the back seat. So, one of the two of them is a liar. It's my own fault I'm out, but it also sort of sucks to know that the holiday spirit can't survive until New Year's.
People really suck
That's horrible. So sorry that happened. If you don't mind telling posting it here, was the item unique?
Not really "unique" but definitely rare
It was a bottle of the 2009 Sam Adams Utopias. It is a beer brewed more like a sherry and they only released about 9000 bottles in November and it is only produced every other year. They retail around $180 and after having been gifted one in 2007, I got a bottle this year as well.
You didn't mention in the
You didn't mention in the post, but did the missing box originate from your visit with family in Maryland? If so, did you call your family in Maryland to see if you might have left it there?
I did
I called them when I realized it was missing and they looked where it was kept while I was there. I also pretty explicitly remember putting it in the back seat so it wouldn't be exposed to the temperatures in the trunk.