Caltrans Comes to the Rescue of an Absent-Minded Driver

It’s everyone’s nightmare: You set something on top of your car to free your hands for a minute. Miles down the road, you remember.

Sara Olsen never expected to see her wallet again. And she certainly never expected that Caltrans would track her down, as she drove from Newport Beach to Massachusetts, through her father in Northern California, to return it to her.

Until then, she said, “My opinion was that government employees just did their jobs without doing anything extra. Clearly, that was a misperception in this case.”

The saga began on Aug. 9, when Olsen, 29, left Orange County on a cross-country trip to Cambridge, where she was enrolled as a beginning MBA student at Harvard Business School. A native of San Francisco, she had driven to Newport Beach to pick up her boyfriend, who would accompany her on the trip.

In Costa Mesa, the pair stopped for gas. Later, she reconstructed what must have happened: “I took my wallet out to pay for the gas, and, as I took my gas cap off, I put the wallet on the roof of my car, probably behind my bicycle rack, and that was the end of it. I forgot about it.”

Arriving in Phoenix six hours later, she suddenly realized that “I didn’t exactly know where my wallet was.” By Albuquerque, she panicked.

“I got so worried about it that I forced us to open up the whole car and look for it and really go through everything. Then I started canceling my credit cards.”

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In addition to two major credit cards and a bank card, the wallet contained her driver’s license and a $100 bill. And a business card from her father in Sausalito.

Enter Charlotte Chavez, 39, a Caltrans employee who oversees crews of prisoners doing highway maintenance work. On Aug. 10, she and her crew were working on the northbound Costa Mesa Freeway at 19th Street when she spotted something unusual in the number two lane.

“I was on the side of the road walking back and forth, and it was in the middle,” she recalled. “Before any cars could come, I ran out and picked it up. It looked like a small purse. I called someone over, and we opened it. I didn’t see the money--we weren’t looking for anything but a license or identification.”

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Eventually, they found the business card with the Sausalito number and gave the wallet to a supervisor, who called Olsen’s father. When Olsen phoned home two days later, some curious news awaited her.

“He said, ‘Did you get the message from Caltrans?’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and he told me that they’d found my wallet. I couldn’t believe it, because he said that they also had the $100, and that really shocked me.”

In fact, Chavez said, such outcomes are unusual.

“Usually when we find stuff on the road, it’s already been gone through,” she said. “Usually, we find it in the bushes, and we just wrap it in tape and put it in the mail.”

Olsen said that getting her wallet “was a really nice feeling. It renewed my faith in mankind, because I couldn’t believe that somebody would bother to track me down.”

Chavez said that she, too, got a warm fuzzy feeling.

“I’m a single parent with two children,” she said. “It’s nice that somebody was able to get their stuff back; I would want that for me.”

Olsen, meanwhile, has begun her graduate business studies at Harvard.

But this episode has convinced her, she said, that “when I’m a CEO, I will have someone else manage the money.”