By Eugene Harnan www.thenational.ae
DUBAI // A reassuring picture of workers devoted to returning lost property would hardly be the first to come to mind when you have just left Dh40,000 on a train.
So it would have been with a great sense of dread that a man arrived at Dubai Metro’s Khalid bin Al Waleed station after leaving a wallet full of foreign currency to that value.
But there it was, at the Metro’s central lost-and-found department, on that nerve-racking afternoon last year.
“He came back fairly quickly to claim it,” says Maribeth Pevea, one of the lead station managers.
“Once I found a brand new iPhone in its original packaging and the owner was quick to notice it gone.”
With almost six million passengers travelling on Dubai Metro every month, it is inevitable some things will be left behind.
Usually, it is a wallet or some shopping. Once, someone forgot a pram.
“It would have been more unusual if there was a baby inside it,” says Ms Pevea.
Rhoda May de la Cruz, another lead station manager, says the most unusual item she has come across was a Spinneys shopping trolley.
“Every day we receive Nol cards [prepaid ticket smartcards], sunglasses and wallets,” Ms de la Cruz says.
Dawood Barham, the customer-service team leader at Serco, the Metro’s operator, says most people are eventually reunited with their lost items.
Under Serco’s lost-property system, when an item is found in a train or station, staff send an email with its details to the other 46 stations on the Red and Green lines. More info
