Students in general tend to lose many things. College students, however, get the gold medal for losing the most interesting array of items. Whereas the usual collection of student “lost-and-found” items is comprised of fairly mundane things like cell phone chargers, iPods, textbooks, shoes, etc, the list does get a bit more unusual where college students are involved.
Student housing provider UNITE recently reviewed the lost-and-found inventory from their buildings, which house over 36,700 students. They discovered “the most weird and wonderful array of left-behind items” that could be imagined. UNITE Sales and Marketing Director Nathan Goddard stated, “After a year of working hard and playing hard, it is no surprise that the students forget to pack everything at the end of term – and what they leave behind never fails to surprise us. From the risqué to the ridiculous, we often wonder how these items make it into their rooms in the first place.” While some items are clearly left behind deliberately for one reason or another – just trying to explain some of these items to Mom and Dad would be awkward at best – many others are genuinely misplaced or forgotten, and many of them are very important to their owners.
UNITE put together a list of the top ten most bizarre items left behind (so far!) in rooms once the college crowd has vacated them. They include:
- A live 6-ft. snake
- A pole – as in a pole dancing/stripper pole
- An authentic, life-size human skeleton
- A pair of live budgies (birds)
- A very large, live white pet rabbit
- A 10-ft. inflatable outdoor swimming pooll filled with water.
- Frozen chicken feet
- A copy of the Kama Sutra – and a whip.
- A scuba-diving suit complete with flippers and an air tank
- A full-size air hockey table.
Lost and Found Software for Universities: Why Implement It?
Due to the growing number of items being left behind (and their growing size and variety) in the rooms rented by college students, it has become necessary to implement a lost and found software for universities. RepoApp is an app utilized by many schools and businesses to manage lost and found inventories and to direct customer claims to the proper place for assistance in retrieving misplaced items. Hundreds of universities make use of it’s services to assist their students or former students in locating their lost property. The app allows users to post photos of items lost or found, capture claims from websites, view auto-matches of items and claims, run and manipulate report data, and more.
The implementation of lost and found software for universities is necessary in order to save time in the management of lost and found item inventory and in matching up these items with their rightful owners for return. It alleviates the need for maintaining a hand-written or computer-generated inventory list which must be updated constantly and individually checked each time someone calls the school asking after a particular item that may or may not have been left behind. The app makes it very easy to search for items from the palm of your hand, with any online device. Easy and convenient for everyone. And it gives you time to come up with a good explanation for that human skeleton you’ll be bringing home!