AirPods and Ethics

Olga once again confronted her nemesis on her walk yesterday morning. Her nemesis wisely stayed out of reach. This cat lives at the same place as Door Cat, but this is not Door Cat, unless it has taken over from the previous Door Cat. Or maybe they work in shifts like Ralph and Sam?

I was confronted with an ethical quandary this weekend. A student left a pair of Apple AirPods (wireless earbuds) in the library several weeks ago. They sat on my desk in plain sight for ages and no one claimed them. So at the end of the year I brought them home -- because, frankly, I could use a pair of AirPods.

Problem is, they didn't have a case. And you need a case, because it's the "brain" of the AirPods and also the method by which they are recharged. So I went to the high school lost & found, which has about 20 pairs of unclaimed AirPods, and the attendant happily gave me a matching case as well as another pair. (I think we all feel like unclaimed lost & found stuff is common property at the end of the school year. Whether this is right or wrong is debatable, given what happened next.)

I carried the AirPods with me when I went out with my boss Friday afternoon, and then when I got home I tried to link the latter pair with my phone. But I had a message on my phone screen saying the owner could see the location of their AirPods with Apple's "Find My Device" app -- and indeed it showed me a map of all my movements that day. THAT freaked me out a little bit. Was someone actually watching me carry around their AirPods, or could they only theoretically see me, if they bothered to look?

This drove home the fact that these AirPods are smarter than your average headphones, and they still belonged to someone else. I found that when I added them to my own "Find My Device" list, they were identified by a student's first name, i.e. "Joe's AirPods." So then I looked in our student database and was able to determine who they probably belonged to. I e-mailed the student and said, "Hey, I think I have your AirPods!"

And the student wrote back, and long story short, I'm leaving them at the front desk of the school for him to pick up. This makes me wonder why we don't use our own phones to identify the owners of ALL the AirPods in the lost & found, rather than letting them just sit unclaimed. (And why don't students look for their lost stuff, for Pete's sake?!)

This also means I still have a pair of AirPods -- the first ones, abandoned in the library -- without a case. It turns out buying a replacement case costs almost as much as buying a new pair of AirPods, so I guess I'll just buy my own pair and return the unclaimed ones to the library. I suppose there's a slim chance their owner will resurface next year. (I really can't identify that person because there's no case and thus no "brain.")

I mowed the lawn again yesterday and did quite a bit of tidying. (Ignore the dead dog at left.) I mowed down the daisy patch, finally -- it was looking weedy and the daisies were browning and enough is enough. I also pulled out most of the remaining forget-me-nots. And today we might actually get RAIN, which would be fantastic. It is dry as a bone out there.

When working in the garden there is inevitably some damage. This rose was on a twig that got broken, so I cut it and brought it inside and now the kitchen is smelling positively rosy.

Oh, and here's a mystery. Some kids living a few houses down have some kind of noisy toy in their back garden. It sounds like radio-controlled racing cars, maybe? They play with it for hours. You can hear it in this video (in which I give you a completely irrelevant visual of bees on the blackberry blossoms):

What do you think that is?!