Lost

Evan first noticed the sign on his way to work while waiting for the number forty-two bus.

It was taped to a telephone pole across from the bus stop positioned directly above an ad for a new fitness club. The layout was familiar, a large photo in the center that took up most of the page, the owner’s contact info with a possible reward at the bottom, and the word “Lost” printed in big, block letters at the top. Whoever had made this particular sign must’ve used a bum photocopier or a printer with a nearly-empty ink cartridge, because the image was so badly blurred that Evan couldn’t make out what he was supposed to be looking at. The text at the bottom was equally illegible and he hoped for the poster’s sake that the rest of the batch had come out better than this one.

He stared at the sign, trying in vain to decipher it until his bus finally arrived. On the ride to work he wondered how effective that sort of thing was. How often did someone’s runaway dog or stolen bicycle turn up because some Good Samaritan saw one of those signs?

He thought about the sign during the long, slow hours of his shift. The latest iteration of the software the company he worked for had released was reasonably stable and had introduced only a few new features and design changes, making his job as a Tier 1 support tech even less eventful than it normally was. Inevitably there would be some “enhancement” somewhere down the line that caused chaos among the users and things would pick up again, but until then it was deader than disco at his desk.

In the midst of his ruminations and daydreaming Evan decided he would skip the bus at the end of the day and instead try to find another one of the signs, hopefully in better shape than its predecessor had been.