Fortunate observations

I went into Nottingham's city centre this afternoon with two of my cousins and the girlfriend of a cousin who wasn't present. I needed some new clothes (socks and a pair of pants), which was interesting because on every other shopping trip in Nottingham I'm accompanying others when they're buying clothes for themselves. We found the clothing I needed within the first forty-five minutes of our time together and we had a free afternoon to engage in other activities.

Near the end of the afternoon, we went into a bookstore. One of my cousins and I decided to sit down in the coffee shop area rather than look for books (prefer Kindles!). We had a little bite to eat when my other cousin and non-present cousin's girlfriend joined us. After chatting for a short while, we then left the bookstore.

Two minutes after we left the bookstore, I felt my pockets and noticed that my money, which I kept in a resealable bag, was missing. I checked all of my pockets and confirmed that my money was not on me; it had obviously slipped out while we had been sat at the coffee table. I rushed back to the bookstore to see if I could retrieve it. Fortunately for me, a waitress had found it and was talking about it to a fellow waiter and another customer. They noticed both me and my being out of breath, so when the waitress asked if the money was mine, I said yes and that I had rushed back up to find it. She untagged my money from the shop's missing items list and then handed it back to me; I hugged her to express my thanks (I also said thank you). Besides my obvious exhaustion, they also knew it was my money because it was in a bag and the waiter had seen me with the bag of money when I made my purchase.

I was fortunate for two reasons. One: when I'm out, I always check my pockets every five minutes; if something seems to be missing, I make the effort to find it (although one could say that I should have checked before I left the shop, but that was a brief lapse and I won't make that error again). The second was that the waitress found the money and was in the process of reporting it being missing; somebody less honest than her might have kept it for themselves.

Again, this is a mistake I'm not going to make for a second time; I usually check my pockets before I'm about to leave a place but I forgot on this occasion. I'm lucky that I was able to retrieve my money, and that waitress is an honest and kind soul.