After visiting both of the customer service centers, who said no computers had been turned in, I started to inventory in my head what was on the machine. Walking back from the far end of the concorse, I thought I heard my name paged. Was it wishful thinking? As I trucked over to Gate 43, I was telling myself not to get my hopes up. I didn't know what they could be paging me about (if it was in fact me), but it couldn't be my computer. After all, there was no identifying information on it, and they wouldn't be able to log in and to see any of the info. (Note to self: Put some identifying information on it.) As I reached the podium, relief swept over me. There it was. Apparently, the machine didn't have time to go to standby and lock them out before someone picked it up. So after digging through, they were able to find it was registered to me. Thank god for the kindness of strangers.
How do you spell relief? What if you walked up to a pay phone in an airport and came across one of these with no one around to claim it? If you're the extremely kind soul who found one in the Denver airport yesterday, you will give it to the nearest United Airlines agent, hoping it reaches its rightful owner. Thank god it did, or my sucky day would have been a lot worse. That's right, in my befuddled state yesterday, I managed to walk off and leave my laptop at a pay phone, after trying (unsuccessfully) to dial in. I realized what I did about 10 minutes later, when I reached for it in my bag, dug through it a dozen times, dumped the bag out on the floor, and, horrified, buried my face in my hands.