GHENT, N.Y. — I’m not breaking any news when I report that I, and probably you, are bombarded with requests to complete customer satisfaction surveys several times a week.
Transfer a few bucks from your savings to your checking account and your bank wants to know how it went? Make an online dinner reservation and the app you used is curious how you’d rate the restaurant’s steak frites?
I was even asked to fill out a survey — they tracked me down through surface mail when I ignored their request to complete the questionnaire online — from a local hospital after a visit to their emergency room. For the record, my experience was satisfactory. I was in and out in under four hours, including a CT scan, which I take is breathtaking speed, even though their doctors could find nothing wrong with me.
So it came as a big disappointment when, after years of being frustrated by such requests, I was offered no opportunity to offer praise and award high scores to a government agency and one of its employees that saved me a major headache.
It happened last week when I returned to my New York City apartment from an evening out and discovered my wallet missing. I didn’t panic, at least not totally, because I’d used it only moments earlier to pay the fare for a taxi that had deposited me at my front door.
There were only two or three places the wallet could have been: In the cab, on the street or sidewalk in front of my building, in the lobby or elevator, or in some thief’s pocket. The perpetrator could have snapped it off the street, or the seat of the cab, rifled through its contents and was currently using one of my several credit cards to buy himself a new Tesla.
I suspected I knew what had happened after checking my pockets again and several other locations in the apartment to make certain I hadn’t mindlessly deposited my wallet on a random shelf. I’d had a pizza at dinner — for the record a tasty Pizza Diavola — and unable to finish it, had brought the rest of the pie home.
Between returning the wallet to my pocket and strenuously attempting to keep the food container upright — an upside down pizza with dislocated cheese and salami is no longer a pizza; it’s just an appalling mess — the wallet probably slipped out of my hands and was sitting somewhere in the gloom of the cab.
There wasn’t any reason to panic, even though I took a sleeping pill that night; but only after suspending or canceling all my credit cards. You don’t really know what desperation is until your bank’s 800 number refuses to patch you through to a live human until you listen to their latest Certificate of Deposit offers or where to go for tax forms; and then it still can’t recognize your request when you enunciate the words “missing cards” exactly as they instructed you to.
But credit cards alone didn’t fill my wallet. There were health insurance cards. My driver’s license and registration. And a folded 20-dollar bill that has sentimental value for reasons I need not describe here.
When I mentioned the incident the next morning to my daughter who was staying at our apartment, she reminded me that the biggest headache I faced wasn’t the loss of the physical wallet or its contents but the information on the canceled cards that would cause my myriad online accounts to suffer nervous breakdowns the next time they tried to process a charge.
Of course, there was the possibility that I was overreacting. Perhaps some good Samaritan would find my wallet and return it to me. But what was the likelihood of that? The world is on fire. At least it’s smoldering. When the last time somebody did something to renew my faith in human nature?
On a whim, an imaginative and highly unrealistic whim, I called the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission shortly after 8 a.m. the next morning. Actually, I called 311, the city’s information number, and somehow found my way to the TLC.
The operator had that weary “heard it all before” tone that didn’t offer much optimism that my wallet and I would be reunited during this lifetime. But I was wrong. What I mistook for boredom or possibly a late night was actually serene self-confidence.
He took down my information and asked a few questions. I’d neglected to record the cab’s identification number — note to self: always take a photograph of the vehicle and driver information card as soon as you take your seat for just such a dismal eventuality — but the operator apparently didn’t find my ignorance disqualifying.
He asked me the time and location when the vehicle dropped me off — I knew the precise moment because the transaction was recorded on my online bank statement — and also the time and location where it picked me up.
Then silence. “Are you still there?” I asked after a couple of minutes.
I feared he might have hung up, dismissing me as a fool for losing my wallet in the first place.
“I’m still here,” he reassured me.
Another minute or two more and he’d somehow found the cabbie’s contact information. He told me to hold on while he tried to call him.
At that moment a friend for whom I serve as a medical advocate called to inform me that his oncologist’s appointment, that I planned to join by phone, was about to begin. So I handed the phone to my daughter.
I learned after my call that the operator informed Lucy that he’d successfully contacted the cabbie, the driver had found my wallet and, remarkably, he had the cabbie on the line and she could talk to him directly. During the ensuing conversation, the driver promised to drop the property off at 5 p.m. that afternoon.
I’d returned upstate by then, and unfortunately couldn’t thank him in person, but my daughter met him in front of our building, retrieved the wallet and insisted he accept a reward even though he tried to refuse. He told my daughter that I got lucky because I was his last fare of the night.
To appreciate how lucky I was — besides having hailed an honest cabbie — one need look no further than my email paper trail with 311. They sent me a notice at 8:27 a.m. informing me that they’d opened a case file and sent a follow-up notice a mere 11 minutes later stating that the file was now closed.
The only piece of information the notice didn’t include was the identity of the 311 operator or how to acknowledge his performance. I finally found a customer service representative whose stellar performance deserved a “10” but I have no idea how to make my appreciation known.