He thought the solution was to carry his stuff around in a "man bag". He has a very good one that he's had for as long as I've known him. It's been in the closet because it "didn't have enough pockets". He bought another one with more and deeper pockets. While we were in London he struggled with that bag because he could never figure out which pocket his phone was in until he'd missed the call. (Welcome to my world!) So while we were in London, we found a market where they were selling bags. He found one with fewer pockets that weren't quite so deep. It was more of a small briefcase than a man bag. But even though it struck me as a bit on the big side, he seemed happy with it and after transferring all of his "stuff" into the new one he gave his old one to the young man in the booth to dispose of. (I'd be willing to bet he turned around and sold it to someone else.)
He seemed happy enough with this new bag. Then last Saturday morning while I was on the stationary bike, panic set it. His wallet was not in his bag. He had checked it three times. That was my cue to get off the bike and help him look. He showed me how he'd looked into each compartment of the bag and then run his hand inside. Nothing. I did the same. Nothing.
I called the restaurant where we'd eaten the night before to see if someone had turned in a wallet. I couldn't believe that we could have walked away from the table and left a wallet sitting on it. But I suppose it's happened with phones, why not a wallet? Alas, no one there had seen a wallet.
The only thing left to do? Cancel the credit/debit cards and get a new driver's license. Guess who gets the bulk of that job? And if he could figure out a way for me to get his driver's license for him, I'd have been doing that, too.
Did I mention how fat that wallet was? Probably because there were about a dozen credit cards in it. Business cards. Personal cards. Debit. Credit. Mastercard. Visa. American Express. Home Depot. Macy's. You name it, it was in there.
Lucky for me I keep a list of all the cards along with the last four digits of the account numbers just because the mail carrier we have here is a bit unreliable. That way if I don't get the bill I can phone them and get a copy sent so I don't incur any late fees or interest charges. The list sure came in handy when I needed to cancel the cards.
But I should have checked the safe drawer because often when we travel, we don't take all of them with us. There were at least three I cancelled unnecessarily. And what I found is that once you cancel them, you can't uncancel them. You just have to wait for the new ones to arrive. Only one card qualified for free overnight delivery. If I'd paid to have the others overnighted it would have cost a small fortune. Fortunately not all of our accounts are joint so I was left with about three cards that I could still use. He had none. I guess he wasn't going to go anywhere without me.
Right after I'd cancelled those dozen cards, which was the safe thing to do because even if we got everything back, someone could have written the numbers down and could have a really good time shopping online. We also decided to sign him up for Lifelock. There's just too much information in your wallet that could be really useful to an identity theif. I phoned them up and while they were trying to up-sell me, Mark came into the room waving his wallet. I would accuse him of not looking very closely except I'd have to accuse myself of the same thing and that's just not possible. That mini briefcase definitely has a black hole in it. Things go in and you are truly fortunate if they come back out. As a consequence, the mini briefcase has been reassigned to the closet and the old man bag has resumed it's duties.
So far so good.
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