Last year, on our way to our end-of-the-year Christmas staff party at Cafe Caprice, we left a box of crackers in the boot of our Uber driver’s car.

Thankfully, after making a mission to get them back, the Christmas crackers arrived intact and we get on with the business of celebrating..

And, of course, we aren’t the only ones who have left something behind in an Uber.

With over 40 million monthly users worldwide, Uber drivers have seen some pretty unusual things left behind. In an effort to show people how to retrieve their stuff, Uber used the collected data to write an ode to those loskop moments:

One of the strangest aspects of public transport is the weird things passengers leave behind when they get out and Uber, arguably the biggest public transport entity in the world, is no exception.

So now we have the Uber Lost and Found Index, a look at the commonplace (cell phones, keys and wedding rings) and the extraordinary (lobsters, wooden hats and violins) things found by Uber drivers in their cars when passengers have left.

Some are understandable; sunglasses, wallets, chargers, IDs, driving licences and gloves are things we routinely handle during our journeys and it’s easy to put them down on the seat beside you and leave them behind in the flurry of getting out at the end of the trip.

But a 1.5-metre Nordic walking pole? A rubber mallet? A bullet-proof vest? These are just three of a long list of seriously oddball objects mislaid by Uber customers. How, we ask, do you forget your wedding dress, your smoke machine or your baby stroller – hopefully without a baby in it?

What’s not so surprising is that the largest number of left-behind items are reported on Sunday mornings, presumably having been forgotten on Saturday night – but we can’t understand the spike in lost skateboards on Mondays!

Or why more people lose their swimsuits on Tuesdays than on any other day of the week, although it’s not such a surprise that Sundays see a rise in the number of lost wedding dresses – we like to think that maybe they’re being left behind by runaway brides.

We’re not going to make similar comments about the unusually high number of briefcases that get forgotten in Uber cars on Fridays, or the number of people who leave their Tasers, their paintings, their jewellery boxes, their chairs, their kites and their copies of ‘Crime and Punishment’ behind.

But our sympathy goes out to those who forgot their paycheques, their Valium, their engagement rings, their portable hard drives, their braai tongs and boerewors, their garden gnomes, lottery tickets and vibrators.

So, if you ever find yourself missing an item, here’s how to get hold of your Uber driver:

[source:iol]