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These are weirdest things Uber passengers left behind last year
It’s not unusual for rideshare passengers to accidentally forget their cellphone, keys or other common belongings in the vehicle. But Uber says people sometimes leave behind far more unusual items.
The company’s latest list of the oddest things riders forgot includes a toupee, a live turtle and a panic button. People are also prone to leave behind bulkier objects, such as a guitar. The most absent-minded passengers? Residents of Miami, Florida, while the most common time to forget personal belongings was 9 p.m. to 10 p.m., Uber said Wednesday.
The rideshare provider said the best way to retrieve forgotten items is to call your driver. If you’ve left your phone behind, however, you can access your Uber account from a computer and contact your driver through its app.
Here are the 50 most unique items left behind in Uber vehicles over the last year as described by passengers:
- Frontal hair toupee
- Hot sauce and a breathalyzer
- I left a leaf in your car that’s much needed
- Two containers with spiders in them
- A Beyoncé fold up fan
- A tray of meat pie
- Ceramic cat
- Jar of oysters
- A personalized blanket with a picture of me and my dog
- Small rat skeleton prop
- Candle that says ‘See you in court’
- A fake tooth / retainer (it’s a really small plastic piece with a fake tooth in it)
- Gray tub of surgical implants
- Police-grade handcuffs
- My live pet animal turtle
- Waist beads and a burrito steamer
- I left expensive blueberries that are special that I need that the store is completely out of. There’s two packages that I absolutely need.
- My girlfriend’s pregnant pills
- Small box containing a gnome.
- Standup paddleboard paddle
- Painting from SeaWorld. It was wrapped up in a roll and I love it.
- A playbill from the Spamalot show at the Kennedy Center
- My robot
- Contraceptive Plan B from Costco and a BaBylissPRO massager machine
- A panic button
- A spear and a furry fox tail
- Taylor Swift autograph. Framed!!!!
- Fart sensor
- Bravo Con wristband
- A #bestdayever foam sign
- 3 feathers
- Fake butt
- Poster of Hillary Clinton
- Panty liner and 1000 bucks. That’s all I can remember
- Some lotion or my thong
- Benihana garlic butter
- Meditation crystals
- Beyoncé heated hand fan
- Undergarments, bread, pack of ham and mayo
- Cardboard cut out panda
- Street sign saying ‘She’s drunk’ and a picture frame
- My father’s beard softener
- Big sentimental carrying jug
- Paternity test
- WWE championship belt
- Large sticker with a dancing cartoon cat that says ‘Spanky Fest’ on it
- I might have left my garden fence in the trunk.
- Jeep Liberty engine. Please call me
- I lost my wizard woman
- Three Japanese ceramic decorative cats — one gold, one black and one pink. All fist-sized.
CBS News
Malcolm Gladwell on “Revenge of the Tipping Point”
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Malcolm Gladwell’s life has changed; he has not
On Tuesday, a new Malcolm Gladwell book comes out. And if history is any guide, it will be a bestseller. “They’re stories about ideas,” he said. “They have characters. They have plots. I’m usually trying to say something about the world.”
His first book, “The Tipping Point,” published in 2000, established the Gladwell recipe: he explores a theme through anecdotes and little-known scientific studies. “‘Tipping Point’ was about the epidemic as an incredibly useful way of understanding how ideas move through society,” Gladwell said. “And epidemics have rules. Let’s learn the rules, right?”
His seven New York Times bestsellers have sold 23 million copies in North America alone. His fee for corporate speeches is $350,000. His fans have downloaded a quarter-billion episodes of his podcast, “Revisionist History,” and he founded a company called Pushkin Industries to produce it.
In other words, Gladwell has come a long way from the small Canadian town where he grew up, son of a British father and a Jamaican mother, whom he describes as “subversive,” someone who would write notes to excuse her son from class with a blank space. “I would just fill out the date,” said the man who skipped a lot of school.
He attended the University of Toronto, but his best education was the ten years he worked for the Washington Post. “I knew nothing about newspapers,” he said. “I was so raw. I was 23, I think, or 24. Bob Woodward was two rows away from me. I learned at the feet of the greatest journalists of my generation.”
In 1996, Gladwell joined The New Yorker. He wrote about why, in the 1990s, New York’s crime rate plummeted in an article called, “The Tipping Point.” A book followed. It introduced a recurring Gladwellian theme: hidden patterns in the way the world works.
He’s a world-class contrarian, about college (“You should never go to the best institution you get into, never; go to your second or your third choice. Go to the place where you’re guaranteed to be in the top part of your class”); about working from home (“It’s not in your best interest to work at home. … If you’re just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live, right? Don’t you want to feel part of something?”); about football (“I think the sport is a moral abomination”).
Gladwell says he enjoys being provocative: “Of course!” he said. “I like poking the bear. I mean, journalists should poke the bear.”
Gladwell’s fans love his storytelling, and the A-ha! moments they bring. His critics, on the other hand, have described his writing as “generalizations that are banal, obtuse, or flat wrong,” and “simple, vacuous truths [dressed] up with flowery language.” “I’m with the idea that not everyone’s gonna like my work,” Gladwell said. “100% of people don’t like anything.”
In a 2021 “Sunday Morning” interview, Gladwell said, “I would rather be interesting than correct.” He called that “an overly provocative way of saying things! No, I think what I meant was, if I turn out not to be right, I’m not devastated. I accept that as the price of doing business.”
Gladwell often turns his mistakes into new chapters or podcast episodes. In “The Tipping Point,” he explained that New York’s crime drop was the result of “broken windows policing.” As he described it, “Little crimes were tipping points for big crimes.” But that philosophy led to New York’s policy of “stop and frisk.”
“Doing 700,000 police stops a year of young Black and Hispanic men is deeply problematic,” Gladwell said. “We were wrong. I was part of that. I’m sorry.”
Which brings us to the new book, “Revenge of the Tipping Point.” “The original ‘Tipping Point’ is a very optimistic, rosy book about the possibilities for using the laws of epidemics to promote positive social change,” he said. “In the last 25 years, I spent a lot of time thinking about the other side of that problem, which is, what happens when people use the laws of epidemics in ways that are malicious or damaging or self-interested?”
The book’s stories range from topics as obscure as cheetah reproduction, to stories as big as the Holocaust. He writes that almost nobody talked about the Holocaust, or even called it that, until NBC aired a miniseries called “Holocaust” in 1978. “And what changed happened like [snaps fingers]. I mean, it was just there was a tipping point in our understanding of the Holocaust,” he said.
This book arrives at a tipping point in Gladwell’s own life. In a span of five years, he got engaged, had two children, turned 61, and moved from Manhattan to pastoral Hudson, New York. “It’s a lot to handle. There isn’t a single person who ever lived whose parents did not say, ‘This is a lot!'” he laughed. “I have become the person that, you know, I once despised, and nothing makes me happier.”
He also despises Ivy League colleges, accusing them of prioritizing their own reputations over focusing on their students.
Has parenthood affected his outlook on any of the things that he’s written about before? “Well, it’s prepared me for the possibility that I will be a massive hypocrite!” Gladwell laughed. “So, you know, it’s one thing to write about what you should do with your kids when you don’t have them.”
For all his success, Malcolm Gladwell maintains that nothing has changed in his approach, his work ethic, or his contrarianism. “It hasn’t changed what I do,” he said. “I don’t farm out my research; I still go on reporting trips. It hasn’t gotten old. In fact, my great regret is I don’t have time to do more.”
READ AN EXCERPT: “Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
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Story produced by Wonbo Woo. Editor: Remington Korper.
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Coldplay on their record-breaking world tour
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