I lost my King­Max 8GB USB drive and before I real­ized it a stranger had sent me a Face­book mes­sage want­ing to return it to me. This is the kind of story most peo­ple think can only hap­pen in a small town or on a small cam­pus, but really it could hap­pen in any met­ro­pol­i­tan area with the help of social net­works like Facebook.

To give you a bet­ter idea about what I lost, it’s a small USB drive that’s about the size of a paper­clip and has a rub­ber cover that makes it a lit­tle big­ger than one of my iPhone earbuds.

You can imag­ine how easy this would be to lose, and now that I think about it I prob­a­bly left it plugged into the back of one of the older iMacs we use in my Dig­i­tal Art lab. I was sur­prised to get this Face­book mes­sage last night from a stranger named Christo­pher Holland:

Hey Max. A friend of mine found a blue “King­Max” 8 gig jump drive the other day. I plugged it in and saw your name on most of the files. Thought you might be look­ing for it. Let me know how you want to go about get­ting it.

I imme­di­ately wrote him back thank­ing him and we set up a place to meet. I met him today in the union and my lit­tle blue USB man was lost no more!

It’s pretty amaz­ing that in this day and age Christopher’s friend didn’t just pocket my lost USB drive for them­selves (I had Adobe CS4 on it with the key in a text file. Major score for any­one who can’t down­load it for free like we can at IU). It’s also some­what amaz­ing Christo­pher was able to fig­ure out it was mine just by the file names (I pref­ace most of my school work files with my IU user­name. I guess it finally paid off!). The most amaz­ing part was that they were able to track me down and get in touch with me with hardly any effort thanks to Face­book (Under­stand­ing and prop­erly using pri­vacy set­tings CAN pay off!).

In the past if I were to lose some­thing even with my name on it, the best I could hope for was some­one turn­ing it into a ‘lost and found’ (if one existed) and I would have to con­tin­u­ally check back to see if some­one turned some­thing in. In the recent past, I might have been able to post to an online forum say­ing I lost some­thing and con­tin­u­ally check back to see if any­one found some­thing sim­i­lar or replied to me. Now with the power of social net­works, some­one can search Face­book or Google for ‘maxbeatt’ and find me mak­ing it extremely easy to con­tact me as well. 

Even though tech­nol­ogy tools made it pos­si­ble for my lost USB drive to be returned, none of it would have hap­pened with­out the efforts of Christo­pher and his friend, and for that I am very thank­ful! I hope peo­ple who lose and find items in less quaint and friendly places than Bloom­ing­ton, Indi­ana will remem­ber how easy it can be to recover and return items using social networks.