all it needs is a " thank you" which VI didnt recieve

certainly good to hear that ... but I'm curious.

how would they have discovered who the phone belonged to, if they had refrained from using, as you say, "essentially anything on the phone"?

Well done to you. I have lost my wallet twice in Zurich and both times it turned up in "lost and found" with everything still there! It's people like you who are responsible for this - well done!

Similar story to Village Idiot's: I was walking with my son in Theaterplatz in Basel. He saw Richard Serra's Intersection, the giant rusty metal sculpturey-thingy (some would call it art), and decided to run through it.



I ran around to the other end and saw a handbag lying on the ground inside the sculpture. I picked it up and saw at once that all the zips (and there were a lot) were open and there was no money in the bag, although there was a wallet with a couple of ID cards for a young Brazilian woman, but no Swiss cards or papers. Conclusion: this bag probably belonged to a tourist or maybe a student and had been stolen, ransacked and dumped.

So I decided to deliver the bag to a police station. I racked my brain but couldn't remember seeing one in the area, so I popped into the Theater shop to ask where a police station was. Blank looks. Then the shop assistant googled and said there was one at Fischmarkt, but since it was just after 5:00 pm on a Saturday, she didn't think that one would be open. (Apparently criminals follow business hours, so the police do too.) Then she suggested that the police station at the Bahnhof SBB may be open. Maybe. But at least I discovered that the Intersection sculpture is known locally as "Pissoir".

So: to the Bahnhof. Not exactly convenient, but OK, off I set to collect my car from the parking garage to visit the police on my way home. At the carpark, a new problem arose: the machine wouldn't read my ticket so I couldn't pay. No-one would answer the intercom. Eventually I had to wander up three floors to the service desk of the supermarket above to find someone who could help -- and of course, in the meantime, my parking fees had increased. After 15 minutes I finally got to speak with the store manager, who took pity on me and spoke excellent English. When I explained the problem, and threw in the bit about the stolen handbag, he exclaimed, "Stolen? In Switzerland? Impossible!" (He may or may not have been joking.) At any rate, he decided to do his own Good Samaritan act and let me out of the parking garage without paying at all, waiving CHF 15.00! Thank you, nameless Migros manager! He also suggested that I try the police station at Binningen, which was on my way home (and was also the only police station I can remember seeing in the Basel area). As we were talking, my son suddently piped up. "Daddy, it's leaking!" I looked down to see a puddle forming under the bag and had a weird mental image of some terrorist's bomb about to explode (too much air travel recently, with liquids limited to microscopic amounts). But no, the cap on the bottle of Evian inside the bag was loose.

So I finally set off for the SBB but couldn't see the police station from the outside, so decided it was safest to continue on to Binningen. I got there at 5:50 pm and was surprised to see that the police station was open (until 6:00 pm), although no-one was actually behind the counter. A press of the doorbell sorted that out, though, and a friendly policeman took the damp bag and my details with Swiss efficiency.

Hopefully the bag was reunited with its owner.

Bottom line -- it's very hard to find the police when you need them.

I was more afraid that the leaking was how you discovered that the sculpture was nicknamed the 'pissoir'.

you can smell it from about 10 meters away with a little breeze

Going International on this topic
My brother lost his iphone 4s last nite in a restaraunt in India. He bought it 10 days ago, told him to have find my iphone feature ON but he forgot to do it ..Calls to apple didnt help and someone promptly switched phone off this morning at 0300hrs. I was calling the number in anticipation someone will answer ...the phone was ringing and all of sudden got disconnected...Tried again and got message number is switched off and all hopes for finding the phone faded...I had sent several messages with phone number to contact to if phone is found and couple of minutes ago my dad just go a call from someone saying they found an iphone and please come and collect it. As i write here my dad is on his way to collect the iphone as my brother has gone for some work.
Thankyou to all samaritans here in Switzerland and all over the world for your kind gesture and taking pains to return the stuff back to rightful owners and hopefully i will be able to return this favor to someone in future.

Did anyone lose a roll of 100 CHF notes with a rubber band around them? I found the rubber band... Drum roll, please. (groan)

One of my good friends in the US met his girlfriend when he returned her purse that he found in a bar. Her cellphone was inside, and he made a few calls until he got ahold of one of her girlfriends, and the two met over lunch the following day, ended up striking up a conversation, which led to a date, and now they're together...

One sunday (a few years ago) I walked down to the town centre to get a paper, on the way back I found a Fr.10 note lying in the rain. Nothing to talk about. However, one year later, almost to that day I also walked down to get a paper, also in the rain. On the way back I recalled the day when I found the ten francs and so accordingly crossed the road at the same spot as last time. There, on the pavement lay a soaked envelope, not normally something one would pick up, but because of the previous find I did pick it up - and discovered to my surprise, that it was filled with (wet) notes. I took it home and counted the money, there was 1650 francs and there was no address, name or other indication of ownership. My wife took it down to the Gemeindehaus on the monday and they said they'd try to find out to whom it belonged. That was in June. When we returned from our summer holidays at the end of August there was a short letter at home telling us that the money had been claimed and we could collect the 10% reward. My wife did so during the following days.
I then took the trouble of phoning the Gemeinde to say that we didn't actually want the reward but I'd like the claimant to come along and say 'thanks', - there was a somewhat long pause. When I went on to ask who the claimant was and where he/she lived I was told that they couldn't give out such information. In other words the money went into someone else's pocket, at least that's my opinion.

Should I ever find anything again I'd do it differently, just to ensure that whoever claims the find is real.

Does the Swiss police charge ChF50 to claimants of lost items?!

Better late than never! I received a message in my inbox today thanking me for returning the wallet.

Apparently the young man is rather prone to losing things -- he'd wanted to phone me to say thanks, but had lost my phone number. Then he'd lost his phone, so hadn't been able to log into Facebook.

He managed to log in today and saw my message, and it was nice that he went out-of-his-way after all this time to send me a thank-you note.