Here's my anecdote: I lost my phone in Japan once, in Tokyo. I was steaming after a night of karaoke and somewhere between the bar, taxi and my hotel, I'd lost my phone. I wandered down to the street at 3am, retracing my steps, and a police officer noticed me and asked what I was looking for. He pointed me back to the hotel reception where where we got on the phone to the taxi company, and then directly onto the driver, who said he hadn't found anything. What was odd, was that I didn't know the taxi company at all, the receptionist had just remembered what I pulled up in.

Accepting that I had lost my phone in a foreign country, I went back upstairs and found it immediately upon walking back into the room. I'd just dropped it under my bag. I went back down and apologized for wasting the receptionists time, but they wouldn't accept it.

The morale of the story being that there was no shortage of help, and that I was a big dummy.