Desperately seeking cellphone? Winnipeg Transit’s Lost Property Office is standing by In Transit
By: AV Kitching Posted: 3:43 PM CST Thursday, Dec. 28, 2023

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2023 (650 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tucked away in a corner of Winnipeg Square’s shopping mall, right under Portage and Main, is a tiny cubbyhole of an office, fronted by a glass window where three Winnipeg Transit staff attend to a line of customers.

To passersby, it’s a nondescript space, lit by harsh fluorescent lighting, seemingly of no interest to anyone other than the people queuing in front patiently waiting to buy bus passes.

But behind the glass partition lies a treasure trove crammed with backpacks, wallets and phones, mitts and tuques in boxes, water bottles neatly arranged and umbrellas hanging off the walls.

A single row of books — an encyclopedia amongst them — and a corkboard where neatly labelled keys hang on hooks, complete this random assortment.

It’s a rather forlorn place, a holding room for things once held dear, now abandoned whether by accident or on purpose, all waiting to be reunited with their owners.

Hidden from sight, a lost property clerks taps away on a computer, religiously logging in everything that has been sent here from the three bus garages servicing the city. Each item has information attached to it on a tag: bus number, route and what time it was found.

The clerk’s job is to enter the information into the computer system before cataloguing each item on the shelves. There they wait, until someone comes seeking them.

Transit passengers can seek their lost property in three ways: fill out a report online via the city’s 311 service form at wfp.to/lostonbus, phone 311 or walk up to the office in person. Required details are: a brief description of the lost property, the route number travelled and the day and time travelled. A clerk will then contact the transit user when their property has been found.

“When somebody comes in they can say, ‘I lost it on whatever bus route and whatever bus’, we can look it up in our system and once they provide a description that can convince us that item is theirs then they can have the item,” explains Adam Cunliffe, Winnipeg Transit’s customer service supervisor.

Cunliffe, who oversees the Lost Property Office as part of his remit, has been in the role for a little over a year. He says the office averages around 400 311 requests monthly, mostly from people in search of their wallets and mobile phones.

“Wallets and cellphones are the most common items left on the bus. That’s usually the ones you get calls for the most because when you leave that people are usually seeking it out,” Cunliffe says.

The Lost Property Office has computer records of lost items from as far back as 18 years ago, with approximately 1,500 items lost per month.

Unclaimed objects are kept for a maximum of 30 days before they are either recycled, donated, or disposed of.

Some of the more unusual things left on buses include bicycles, wheelchairs and once, believe it or not, an artificial limb.

“People leave all kinds of things on the buses. A couple of years ago, it happened before I started working here, somebody left a prosthetic leg on the bus. They were taking it to get repaired, they left it on the bus and forgot to grab it, which made the story make more sense,” Cunliffe laughs.

av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca

AV Kitching
Reporter

AV Kitching is an arts and life writer at the Free Press. She has been a journalist for more than two decades and has worked across three continents writing about people, travel, food, and fashion. Read more about AV.

Every piece of reporting AV produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.