Losing My Wallet: Episode IV

Most of you know (or maybe you don't) that I... don't always have my shit together. Oh, I get good grades, am a decent athlete, and only a little socially awkward, but things slip my mind over the course of a day that normally don't slip a person's mind once a month. Case in point, I have lost (or thought I lost) my wallet on three separate occasions prior to this Thursday.

Let's make that four.

We begin with the K Street Subway. The Subway restaurant at 21st and K is the best-administered Subway in the GW area. I've been going there since freshman year, and therefore, the people there know me, especially the Caribbean guy who is the manager (or at least is working there all the time). They can have a line up to the door, and even if you are last in that line, you will have your food in ten minutes or less. Not only that, but they properly assemble a sandwich. No extraneous meat spilling out, no horribly out-of-proportion add-ons... they're pros.

I was eating at Subway this fine Thursday, as I usually do. I had just escaped the fat farm at which I work, and I felt good about myself for eating something healthy for lunch yet again. Seriously, there's enough blubber in my office to light all the whale-oil lamps of 18th century Europe, so I feel productive for taking a step to ensure I don't end up like them. I finished my meal, I chucked my trash in the garbage, and walked out onto K Street. On my way out, I spotted Matt, one of the professional staff at CLLC. I said hello, exchanged pleasentries, and went on my way back to my apartment to finish out my lunch break before my class. I got to my apartment, reached back to grab my keycard-containing wallet, and... nothing but my ass back there - this cannot be good.

I ran back to the Subway, and my wallet was neither on the table nor anywhere else - no one had turned it in to my friend the manager. I concluded someone must have stolen it while I was throwing my trash away - there's simply no way I could have walked away from my table without my wallet, so it must have been gone before I picked up my bag and left. I sat through class, writing down each thing that I had to cancel or replace as I thought of more and more things. I also hoped that maybe... MAYBE that guy Matt saw a wallet on the table (I was sitting right next to the door), and picked it up. Maybe, before handing it to the manager, he looked inside, saw it was mine, and said "Ohh... Dave Stira's wallet! Wellll, I'll just have to send him an email when I get back to the office!"

Alas, when I returned to work, there was nothing in my inbox except pointless ultimate team emails about wiffleball, so I called my mom to get the phone number of the credit union from which my Visa was issued. She gave me the number, but suggested looking in the trash - maybe someone just stole the money (a whopping $12) and dumped the wallet. What was more likely, I thought to myself, is that I chucked my wallet with the rest of my garbage and didn't give it a second thought. This has happened before. In 2005, I threw away my student ID at the GW Hospital cafeteria. Armed with this new hypothesis as to how my wallet disappeared, I decided that pawing through garbage would be more interesting than work, so I left.

The manager at Subway informed me that the garbage from lunch had already made its way out into the dumpster. I told him I was not above dumpster diving, and he agreed to have me go back and look through it. One of the employees who wasn't doing anything important also volunteered to go help me. So the search party of me and a 50-year-old Hispanic Subway worker named Jose embarked on our search for my lost Nautica wallet (just bought it last month! What the hell). We arrived back behind the building, and Jose jumped into the dumpster and heaved three bags of festering garbage onto the pavement. I ripped open the first bag, and after picking through daintily at first, I decided an elbow-deep ruffling was the only way I was going to get through all this trash fast enough to get back to the fat farm without feeling bad about saying on my time sheet that I got back from class at 2:00. I finished the first bag. Nothing. My counterpart finished his first bag. Nothing.

Here I am dripping with trash-juice, and having come face to face with my most treacherous culinary foe. Tomatoes. Allllll up in that business. The words "Oh well, I guess it's not here. Dammit..." were just leaving my mouth, when, as Jose and I are sorting through the last bag of disgusting middle-management castoffs, he lets loose a hearty "haHAAA!" and pulls out my wallet, saturated in garbage-juice. He extends his hand, and with a shower of lettuce particles and indistinguishable soft drink droplets, we shake hands vigorously, celebrating our victory.

After having my wallet show up at UPD (University police) twice in the past year or two, this is definitely my best wallet-losing story ever. Who knows how many more I'll have in my next year of school and any grad school thereafter. But I can tell you that Jose deserves a raise. And that I will never go to another Subway again.