Walletgate

I get to mingle with society twice a week when I go into the University and to catch up on work and bring some work home. When I returned from one of these rare outings on Thursday I realized I lost my wallet. Maybe I should be on total lockdown if I can’t even make it from my car to the office without incident. Really. I am being trusted with a walking distance of, what, 200 feet? And I lose my wallet?? This doesn’t forebode well for Nabisco. If I can’t keep track of a wallet, what makes me think I can keep track of a baby? I mean, wallets don’t even usually crawl around on their own.

So Thursday night I logged into my work e-mail account from home. I wanted to e-mail our giant security guard, Al, to see if any wallets had been turned in. Maybe it fell out of my purse during that 200 foot trek. To my surprise, I already had an e-mail from Al waiting for me. But it was a mass e-mail about a string of thefts happening on campus. I had a flashback to those 5 or 6 (dozen) bathroom trips I made, leaving my purse behind unguarded at the desk. I dropped to my knees and did one of those slow-mo “Noooooo”s, as is the popular response to crisis with folks in the talkies.



In assessing the damages of a missing wallet, I realized I am really not too bad off. Fortunately, I am enough of a slob that my debit and credit cards weren’t in my wallet anyway. They were floating around on the sea of Kleenex, Tylenol bottles, prenatal vitamins, doctor visit receipts, and other things you find stuffed into a pregnant woman’s purse. Plus I only had less than a dollar in change on hand. So if someone stole my wallet, they would be very disappointed to basically only end up with my driver’s license, (which doesn’t have much value, but it does feature a picture of me with flyaway hair, a slightly insane look on my face, and a laughably charitable “weight” indicated).

I was going to get a bonus outing today as a result of the missing wallet – a trip to the DMV! That may be the happiest place on earth, if by “earth” you mean Waukegan, IL. I was almost looking forward to it.

After a weekend of worrying and practicing less crazy looking driver’s license pictures in a handheld mirror, the trip to the DMV was cancelled. This doesn’t make me any less stupid, but it turns out my wallet was here at home the whole time. It was in a chair, buried under various baby paraphernalia I’ve been getting in the mail over the last couple of weeks.



True story.