Thousands of items lost, found across campus

Mary McLimans was sure she’d never see her engagement ring again.

McLimans had come to Madison in October 2011 to watch the Badger football team play the University of Nebraska. When the ring started to hurt because she was clapping so hard that night at Camp Randall stadium, she slipped it off her finger and into her purse.

“I knew when I did it that it was foolish,” says McLimans, a 1970 graduate of UW–Madison who now lives in Wilmington, Del.

She rushed back to the stadium after discovering it was missing, but was doubtful she’d find the ring when she saw workers with leaf blowers cleaning out the stands. She still left her name at the security office and was surprised to get a call a few days later asking her to describe the ring, which been found and turned in to stadium officials.

“I was flabbergasted and so thankful that someone would do that, and it made me even more homesick for Madison,” McLimans says.

On a campus that spans 936 acres and where more than 61,000 people work and study on a given day, it’s only a matter of time before things go missing. But despite the challenge of so many people moving and mixing on campus, many of the items that are lost — sunglasses, mobile phones, books and single shoes — are not only found, but ultimately reunited with their owners.

Roger Vogts, assistant facilities director for the Wisconsin Union Directorate, works with student employees at the unions and the Red Gym to catalog, track and manage the thousands of things that get left behind in the buildings each year.

“It’s a thankless job and you get no credit for it, but when we can reunite someone with something, it makes it feel like it’s worth it,” Vogts says.

There is a central online database of missing items, available through My UW, where people can post notices about things they’ve lost or found or check to see what someone else has located.

Sgt. Aaron Chapin, spokesman for UW Police, says police log what gets turned in to the department and keep an eye on the lost and found database.

“Our property manager will look and say, ‘Someone reported a green and pink iPod to the list, and I’ve got one here, so we’ll see if we can connect and get it back to the owner,’” Chapin says.

Each building on campus also has its own way of managing lost items.

Noe Vital, a junior in the Wisconsin School of Business and an event management supervisor for Grainger Hall, created an Excel spreadsheet with descriptions, categories, dates and times to track all of the items turned in to the information desk. Nonvaluables — mainly water bottles — are kept there, while valuable items are held in a locked cabinet.

When an item is claimed, it’s signed out, Vital says. People are good about coming back to pick some kinds of things up, he says, especially mittens, gloves, scarves and cellphones.

If you lose something in the Memorial Union or Union South, it goes into a box at the information desk where people can stop by to look for things they’ve lost. Every week, items still left at Union South get shipped to the Memorial Union, where they’re taken to a room in the basement and sorted into bins.

Items can only be stored for so long. At the end of each semester, the Union staff takes what’s still left in the bins and donates it, with most of it going to Goodwill, Vogts says. Grainger Hall staff members take items to the Easter Seals after holding them for about two months, Vital says.

UW Police keep most items for 30 to 60 days, then look to donate it, convert it for department use or send it to SWAP (Surplus With A Purpose). Sometimes, the person who found something can ask to have it returned if no one steps forward to claim it, Chapin says.

One of the easiest items to reunite with an owner: cellphones.

“What officers do is open it up, call people in the cellphone list and say, ‘Whose phone am I calling from? Can you call them and tell them their phone is at UWPD and they should come pick it up?’” Chapin says.

Everyone who deals with lost and found items has a story about some of the odd things they’ve seen.

Late last year, a cello found at the Red Gym spent a few days in the Memorial Union lost and found before the owner claimed it, Vogts says. Until the cello turned up, Vogts thought a bag of unworn Victoria’s Secret teddies in one of the bins at the Memorial Union was the strangest thing that had been found in the building.

“Random things get turned in, that’s for sure,” Vital says.

A canoe turned up at UWPD several years ago, Chapin says.

“We had no clue who it belonged to, nobody claimed it, and then it was, ‘What do you do with a canoe?’” he says. It was recently sent to SWAP.

Not every story about missing items has a happy ending. During her first year on campus, Danielle D’Agostino, a 2010 graduate of UW–Madison, lost her Wiscard in a residence hall dining room.

Six months later — long after she’d gotten a new one — someone from the dining room called to say her Wiscard had been found and she could come by to retrieve it.

“I laughed a bit and told the person on the phone that I lost my ID the previous semester and was currently in New Jersey, so there was no way I could just drop by and pick it up,” D’Agostino says. “Of course we were able to laugh it off because it was only a Wiscard and could easily be replaced.”