Airport Laptop

I was sitting in the Oakland airport, waiting for my flight to Boston. A couple walk up, drop their stuff. “I put your laptop in the duffle.” He says.
“I already did.” She says.
He opens the duffle. “Isn’t this yours?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, I guess I grabbed someone else’s laptop. I’d better take it back to security.” And he walks back to security.

I can’t believe it. How do you forget your laptop? I am so paranoid about mine and it belongs to my company! Can you imagine how stupid you would sound, telling your boss that you lost your laptop?

Morons.

Now we go back three years.
Wonder Girl and I arrive at the Oakland airport, for a flight to Vegas. After passing through security, we walk over to a bunch of empty seats. I see a laptop sitting on a seat. I walk over, drop my jacket on top of the laptop, drop my backpack on the ground and sit.
My mind slips into overdrive.
I open my backpack and get out a book. My wife sits down next to me and does the same.
I open the book and pretend to read as I discretely scan my surroundings. No one seems to be watching me.
Or so I think.
Any moment now, someone is going to come running over, looking for their laptop.

Should I keep it? My luck, someone will come and get it. Or worse, as I enter the plane, someone will see it and denounce me as a thief.
Or there is something wrong with the laptop. Perhaps it is meant to be taken aboard the airplane. Then as the pressure drops as the plane climbs, a sensor trips and one of the battery packs is not really filled with batteries. The resulting explosion takes out the plane, or at least the greedy bastard that kept what did not belong to him.
And out there, somewhere, is the moron who misplaced his laptop. How would I feel if I lost a laptop? And you know, it’s not like finding a twenty on the ground. With no name on it, you can keep the twenty. But you know a laptop belongs to a specific person.

And what if the terrorist comes back for his laptop? What data is on it that he wants?
Or a drug dealer?

I sigh, pick up the laptop, turn to my wife and tell her what I have found, then I get up, walk over to the security desk and hand them the laptop, explaining that someone left it.
Security calls for a police officer.

I explain to them what I found, we boot up the laptop(maybe stupid?) But nothing blows up.

I give them my info and write down the serial number of the laptop. I also find out that if no one claims it in thirty days, it is mine.

I walk away, feeling okay. Maybe I’ll get a reward? Maybe a laptop?

A week after the trip, I call up the lost and found. The conversation went like this.

“Hi, I am calling about a lost laptop I turned in at the airport a week ago.”
“Are you the officer who turned it in?”
“No, I am the guy who found it.”
In an extremely hurried voice she said, “It’s been picked up.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
I hang up. The bastard officer took it for his own and she knew it! I should have just kept the damn thing!

Addendum.
I was chatting with cousin some months later and mentioned the incident. Still pissed that I passed up a free laptop.
“Oh.” She said. “You did the right thing. And not just because it’s the right thing. Yes, a terrorist might have used it to plant explosives. But it has been used as a way of passing information from one group to another. I would not want some criminal group coming after you, trying to recover it. They are not nice people to deal with.”

I feel better. Cousin deals with people like that. Better her than me.