SA's lost baggage piles up

HARD LANDING: PANIC SETS IN WHEN YOUR PHONE ISN'T IN YOUR HAND

- Hein Kaiser

Mild and wild expletives are sometimes not enough to express what we feel like when we forget stuff.

Not only does it usually mean a goodbye and goodnight kiss to our possessions forever, but the sheer stupidity of accidental neglect is as frustrating. Travelling makes it worse.

The f-word only partly describes the frustration when realising that your sunglasses are not on your face and your ID book is missing in action somewhere between the boarding gate and check in.

At some point you were yakking on your phone, chilled in a lounge or parked off in a coffee shop, but where in the universe did you leave your parking ticket?

A new National Geographic series, Inside Airport Lost and Found, shares some bizarre tales of what people leave behind in airports. Whether it's a prosthetic eyeball or taxidermied animals, it's all somewhat strange and, oh, so much fun.

Not least because this time it wasn't you that left your whatnots somewhere, but someone else.

But South African travellers are just as absentminded as their global peers.

Locally, said Airports Company SA (Acsa) spokesperson Ofentse Dijoe, people mostly leave behind identity documents, passports, cellphones and chargers.