In the days after St. Patrick's, OUSA Lost Property received 26 quality drink bottles, 14 chargers, 5 pairs of headphones, 4 Apple pens, 3 reading glasses, 2 telephones, 1 driver's license (rescued from Castle26 box negotiations), and 80 more assorted items. They don't have a partridge on a pear tree, but they might have something of yours. From June to December 2025, pleas for that-shit-you-left-in-your-lecture made up over a third of all enquiries to OUSA reception.
Prying open the lost property and main reception reports, which OUSA conducts monthly, Critic Te Ārohi found that 2,028 items were handed in over the last six months. Critic cannot calculate the exact dollar value of all the items handed in to reception, but we did try. So through best guesses of the various categories of techy items, such as AirPods, Apple pens, phones and laptops, Critic Te Ārohi’s conservative approximation for how much lost property reception took in over the last six months was $25,000, but ranged up to $58,000. That’s at least over two years of rent in just half a year.
While OUSA Main Office gets some pretty good pick ups for more expensive items, their average monthly return rate is 26.88%. What gives, man? Senior Receptionist Kayla Havinga chalks this up to the high-volume items, which, being cheap-as-chalk, are not followed up on. Think of freebie water bottles, various costumes, and Shein. Fast fashion, and its consequences.
Cheap clothes and chargers made up a quarter of total lost property items over six months. 128 charging cables remain unclaimed, and only 44 of 280 items of clothing have been picked up. A particular repeat offender is drink bottles. Kayla describes drink bottles “as the bane of [her] existence”, having handled 315 from June to December 2025 – many of which are expensive Hydroflasks or Yetis. It’s the least favourite part of her job: they’re usually full of coffee, strange liquids, and generally skody. Most of them are lost in Castle Lecture theatres. A pox on your house.
Anything that has been lost long enough that all memory of it is forgotten, can be moved on and sold at the Radio One Market Days, where all proceeds go to charity. Some water bottles and clothes are also donated to the homeless shelter, and some old electronics move onto Comm2Tech – though most lost phones are handed over to the Police. This Market Day, the lost property stall took away $345 for Ōtepoti Communities Against Sexual Abuse.
While students are too stressed, or just can’t be bothered, to care sometimes, awareness of how OUSA lost property works might bump the numbers of what gets reclaimed. The office gets shit from all over campus (note that Unipol and Clubs and Socs have their own lost property departments). Campus Watch typically collects all lost property and then drops it off either Tuesday or Thursday afternoon. If you have lost something, Kayla recommends to pop in, even though it may not have been picked up yet. Sometimes members of the public do hand things in pretty immediately, but letting Kayla and the rest of the reception team know means they can grab your details and keep an eye out. Everything is kept for 3 months, except bank cards, which are immediately cut up – if you lose one of those, cancel it immediately. And they do take vapes, guys.
Kayla recommends that students missing an item fill out an online form, the QR code of which is at the top of this article. That form links to a database, which is a “list of stuff people have reported missing”, explains Kayla. But even if you have reported it, it pays to come to reception in person – the team receives so many reports they sometimes miss some. “It pays to do both,” Kayla says. “It’s nice to cover all the bases, you know?”. Name your items with your first and last name too, as that allows Kayla and her team to look them up in the OUSA system.
Be aware though – OUSA reception has encountered liars, thieves, and other pinchers-of-shit-that-ain’t-theirs. The reception is armed with silly questions like, "When and where did you lose it," and, "What does it look like?" and "Can you please connect to it?". Swiper, no swiping.
"Returning sentimental things, and seeing people light up, that's what's best about this job," says Kayla. Good vibes have sprung forth, with one student so overjoyed to have recovered their mother's ring, passed down through the family, they bought the office thank-you chocolates. But equally concerning is what collects dust. Some poor soul has lost a laptop, still in the box. Eleven pots and pans were found under mysterious circumstances. OUSA once even had someone’s grandmother's ashes handed in many years ago. If you left your bra in a study room, like, rock on – but come get it. In the distant past, they even had a prosthetic limb handed in (gone now) so there’s really no limit on what you could’ve lost and find once more.
