Bus company waits 10 years to return lost items

A bus company in Fuyang, Anhui Province has been storing found items in the hopes of returning them to their owners.

And over the past decade, they’ve collected a lot of stuff.

“There’s nothing you can think of we haven’t found on a bus,” Jiang Chen, the company’s deputy director of service management, told Beijing Youth Daily.

Jiang’s department of six employees handles nearly 700 buses on 34 routes, serving a metropolitan area of nearly 8 million people.

Lost items include everything from wallets and phones to cameras, luggage and most recently, a stroller. “When the mother came back to pick it up, she said she got off the bus in a hurry and was holding her baby, so she just forgot it,” said Jiang.

The most frequently lost items, however, are bus passes.

“We collect hundreds a month. We’ve got 10 plastic bags full of them,” said Jiang.

But as most items are never claimed, the company is having issues managing what are now rooms filled with lost property.

Jiang explains the company has two storage spaces, a larger one for older items and a small one for recently lost property.

Some items have been in storage for 10 years, but not everything lasts.

“Perishables get dealt with on a regular basis. But things like books will be categorized and stored,” said Jiang.

Although they are only required to keep lost items for one year, Jiang and his department hold on to anything that is easy to store out of concerns that owners are momentarily too far away to retrieve them.

“I remember a time last year when we found an old man’s camera. He was not in the area. We had it for about 6 months before he came back to get it,” said Jiang.

Jiang said the lost property department has been more successful of late thanks to phones and the internet.

“In recent years we’ve been able to get about 85 percent of lost items back to their owners,” said Jiang.