Yesterday evening on the way back from the supermarket I found a mobile phone lying on the ground. I looked around, picked it up and put it into my pocket. Once I had got home, I kept the phone on expecting the owner to call it the moment they realised it was lost.

I checked out the number by calling 10086 and discovered that the SIM had over 200yuan on it, so I was expecting a call. I checked the phonebook for possible contacts but found that it was empty.

Come the next morning the owner must have realised what he or she had done because the SIM was blocked. There was never a call made to the phone, the owner probably figured that ‘what good would it have done anyway!’ and simply made sure to cancel and transfer the SIM to a new phone.

I’ve had experience with this before and It doesn’t really surprise me that nobody called the phone back. When you lose a phone it’s gone, whether that be in the back of a taxi at a restaurant or in any public place (I’m yet to hear of anyone getting their lost phone returned). Even if you can place where you last had it, this is of no use. Nobody will accept liability, the chances are much more likely that it’s been switched off and sold for a couple of hundred yuan at the black market.

I think this touches upon a vein of dishonesty that runs through so much in life here, a type of selfishness that most outsiders consider obnoxious. People acting without conscience and being able to justify almost anything.

The ‘If I don’t do It then somebody else will’ attitude.

Sure there are always dishonest people anywhere in the world, however I find it difficult to believe that there is another country where it is so rampant, for me it is like a disease. Perhaps this stems from a basic lack of morals and/or spirtual influence being replaced by raw materialism. Money = morality. Maybe having no rule-of-law and a corrupt justice system makes things very easy to get away with. It is fair game; finders keepers, losers weepers.

It’s probably a sign of how conditioned I am, that I don’t feel bad about this anymore. I do have a conscience and I do have morals, though I you have to be pragmatist. But I still believe that once I chose to pick up the phone and put it into my pocket there was nothing more I could do. If the person won’t even call their old phone and ask for it back it is no longer my problem.

I certainly won’t be handing it to the police, that’s for sure. There probably isn’t even a system in place for handing-in lost property and I might end up get accused of being a thief!