Ready to purchase her daily coffee at Java City and start the day, Halston Reece, a student at SMU, opened her wallet to find her student ID missing. Unable to recall where she last had her ID, she thought of dozens of spots around campus.
“I didn’t have time to go all around and try to find my ID, and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of having to pay for a new one,” Reece said. “But thankfully I only had to go to one place, and my ID was found.”
Umbrellas, student identification cards, keys and cell phones are all items that fill the lost and found cabinet located at the Mane Desk in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center. The cabinet serves as SMU’s only formal location to turn in and recover possessions that have been misplaced around campus.
SMU student and employee at the Mane Desk, Mackenzie Marr said, “Many students do not even know they have this option.”
Each day, an average of two SMU students come to the Mane Desk and are able to successfully claim lost objects with little effort.
“About 50 percent of the time, we have whatever it is someone has come to look for,” Marr said.
In order to claim a cell phone or other, more expensive items, specific protocols are required. If student has lost a cell phone, they must know the number of the phone and call it to make the phone ring.
For credit cards, there must be a picture identification matching the card name.
If the item has the individual’s identification on it somewhere, he or she is contacted over e-mail.
Some items are quicker to be claimed.
“In the rainy season especially, people always are quick to recover their umbrella,” Marr said.
Any item is welcomed in the cabinet, and there are no restrictions on where that item can come from on campus.
According to Marr, the most interesting item that has been turned in was a whistle and said, noting that “almost anything goes.”
Assistant director of Hughes-Trigg, David Hayden, explained that the Lost and Found “also serves as an electronic search site,” which students can access at smu.edu/htrigg/lostandfound.
The site enables students to describe what was lost and receive a response as to whether or not it was turned in.
If items are left unclaimed in the cabinet, they are handed over to the SMU Police Department. The cabinet is cleaned out once a month and at the end of the school year.
Hayden explained that while the Mane Desk houses the only specifically designated area for a campus-wide Lost and Found, “most buildings would have a building manager, housekeeping area or office that might serve in that capacity.”
“Instead of looking for a needle-in-a-haystack, you can make it a lot easier on yourself and simply walk over to the Mane Desk,” Hayden said.
