A Frankfurt, Germany man who lost his Nintendo Switch at one of the busiest airports in the world was reunited with his console in mere hours after posting about it on Reddit.
Juan, who asked that we not use his last name, was looking forward to whiling away the time on his flight with Floor Kids, a Switch game he’d downloaded for the three-hour ride to Madrid. What he didn’t know yet was that, on the bus ride to his gate, his Switch had fallen out of his bag and landed between some seats. Searching for it on the plane, he later told me, “I started sweating bullets.”
Juan asked the flight attendants whether the bus was still parked. They said it had left. He frantically filed a lost-and-found report with the airport and, for the rest of the flight, sat thinking of his 55-hour Zelda and 33-hour Binding of Isaac save files. Shortly after landing, Juan had an idea: He’d seen others post about lost Switches on the 400,000-subscriber Nintendo Switch subreddit. Why not give it a shot?
“I lost my Switch at Frankfurt International Airport,” he wrote on /r/NintendoSwitch subreddit. “Please if you’re the driver of the bus, I’d be eternally grateful and bring you chocolates.” In the post’s body, he added, “I know this has 0,000001% possibility to work.”
Juan’s Switch
The first person who commented was XxPyRoxXMaNiAcxX, who dropped a link to another /r/NintendoSwitch thread, written by the user Itchybun an hour earlier. It read, “Found a lost Switch, any idea how to contact the owner?” It offered no details on where the Switch was found or what it looked like.
“My friend found the hardware on the bus,” Itchybun, who asked that we not use his real name, later told me. His first move was to turn on his own Switch and look for a social feature that could help him connect to the lost Switch’s owner. But, nope: the Switch has no features like that. His second move was to reach out to Nintendo and ask the gaming company to connect them. That didn’t go anywhere fast enough. Then, he wrote a Reddit post. An hour later, he’d hear from Juan.
“It took four hours to find him,” Itchybun said. In DMs, Itchybun asked for Juan’s username, the JoyCons’ colours, known wi-fi names, some friends’ names, the last played game and what cartridge was in the console to verify that he was the owner. Juan answered all his questions correctly.
“Once I replied to all the questions, he said, ‘100 points.’” Juan laughed. He’ll be meeting up with Itchybun and his friend in the new year to retrieve his lost console. In an update to his original Reddit post, Juan wrote, “Today I love this community even more and especially that great user and person who decided that finding the owner would be more fun than just keeping it.”
Comments
4 responses to “Man Loses Switch, Meets Person Who Found It Via Reddit”
There are social features, it’s just a bit of work if he’s connected Facebook/Twitter up.
Just find a screenshot or take one yourself, and if there is an account connected, post it to that and you can leave a message and hopefully the owner will see it pop up.
Dude probably doesn’t own a switch and just being a nice guy to post on switch subreddit
Or hand in the switch to airport security who already had the mans details, and knew what he had lost.
That is the part I am completely confused about. If they didn’t intend on keeping it, why did they walk out of a secure area with it.
Possibly, and it definitely wasn’t a sledge or anything. Just a PSA if anyone comes across one and wants to do the right thing.
Lucky dude. 99% of people would have just taken it for themselves.
I have a similar story.
My bro found a pouch full of PSVita games on the train. At least 20 catridges, and they were mostly JRPGs. We wanted to hand it into Public Transport Victoria and have them help find the owner and let us know if they find them. PTV were little bitches and told us to hand it over and there would be no communication between us and them even if they did or did not find the owner. So we felt uneasy and just didn’t hand it over. So I took it upon myself to find the owner. I joined as many gaming communities on Facebook as I could that was in Victoria. Sent out messages to every page, but no answer for months. A lot of arseholes kept telling me that I was stealing and that I should just keep it to myself or sell them. As a owner of the PSVita, I know how much these games cost and would never ever take them. As time passed by, I suddenly got a PM on Facebook asking about the games. He said they belonged to him and that he would like them back. I asked him to identify the games in the pouch and he replied with more than 10-15 of the games on the list. So he was the owner and told us that he did indeed forget his gaming pouch a few months back on the train. So the day after my bro met up with him in the CBD and handed his games over. Really happy that my bro and I found the owner.
Goes to show that social media has its benefits.