Finders Keepers

Returning to fair Harvard in September can mean a lot of things:  the chance to take new classes, see old friends, and enjoy Cambridge without a permanent layer of snow on the ground.

It can mean back to school shopping for some...and back to school stealing for others—and there's the rub.

You might have been one of the lucky contingent of back-to-schoolers who successfully recovered their refrigerators, chairs and futons from House storage areas without a hitch (barring, perhaps, a little lower back pain). Some others...not so much.

House lists have been flooded with complaints of lost, stolen, or misplaced items—along with the more optimistic bunch hoping that maybe someone just took their entire futon from the depths of storage... by accident.

More after the jump.

Then there's a third group, who eagerly offer amnesty to contrite storage robbers. One individual, who shall remain nameless, wrote to the Currier houselist, wrote, "P.P.S. - anonymous drop offs of my M.I.A items may be delivered to [redacted]......if you wish to remain shrouded in mystery."

One Mather House resident offered to help out one of the pilferers and give whoever swiped his chair the arm rests they left behind.

"[H]onestly, even if you took my chair (armless) you can have the arms -- I was gonna sell it for $5 anyway," he wrote.

Another good samaritan had secont thoughts after claiming a whiteboard that had been left outside of storage along with some other items.

I was walking along in the B entryway basement hallway going to the computer lab, and randomly saw a desk, mattress frame and whiteboard leaned against the wall, looking like they had been deserted there for a while. Thinking this was left-over stuff someone no longer wanted, and hating for a whiteboard to go to waste, I took the whiteboard up to my room. It occurred to me, however, someone might have been temporarily storing their stuff there for later use. So I wanted to check: is this anyone's stuff? Was this for giving away, or for storage?

Turns out, the whiteboard was never claimed.

Michael Lim '12, of Mather House, who had a chair of his own stolen, blamed inattentive student monitors in an interview with FlyBy. He said he did not think they were properly checking names off their lists to make sure items were not stolen.

"I am pretty sure it was stolen because I remember leaving it toward the front of the door," he said. "It just sucks that I have to get a new one."

Joo-Hye Park '10, of Winthrop, said she was one of the last people to put stuff in storage and one of the last to try to get some out. She said someone might have taken her light blue chair, an assortment of textbooks, and two business suits by mistake.

“At this point , yeah I’m hoping to get it back but I don’t think I will,” she said.