Lost wallet

I'm so lucky, I've never been mugged or pickpocketed* but I have lost my wallet...twice.  The first time was just after I moved to the UK, I had no cash, no credit card, no ATM card, nobody to help me, and I was living in a hotel so I didn't even have the option of eating at home!  I was quite desperate during the week or so it took to cancel all my cards and get new ones.  And then a few days later, my wallet fell out of a suit pocket in the closet.

So when my wallet went missing two weeks ago, I was hopeful it would show up on it's own.  However, I was so busy I had no time to look for it.  It took a good week just to go through my drawers and closet, plus the car and office, but I finally came to the inescapable conclusion that it was not coming back, and I needed to deal with it.

Fortunately I had some emergency cash so I was fine until the bank cards arrived.  The driver's license was a bit more annoying, as I had to go to an agent and provide sixteen forms of ID, plus pay $38 for the privilege.  Similarly the Snapper card (the equivalent of London's Oyster card) cost $10 to replace.  (More annoying, the city is looking to get replace Snapper cards with HOP cards, so this is a limited investment at best.)  I have yet to replace my library card.

I also lost a $30 gift card from Mitre 10, the local DIY chain, I'd just received a few days before. I had returned some window stays that I'd never gotten around to installing on the last house, and the current house didn't need them.  As the cashier pointed out, 11 months was slightly out of their 28-day refund policy, but she gave me the gift card instead.  Amazingly, I was able to fish the receipt out of the bin and take it back to the shop, and they re-issued another gift card!

But of course, the main thing I miss is the wallet itself.  When my last wallet died, I decided to eschew a leather replacement and found this:

It was made out of Tyvek, the same material used for shipping packages.  I didn't think the wallet would last six months but it lasted two years and was still in fine condition!  Plus everybody loved the idea of a wallet made out of money.  Of course, being in NZ I couldn't get another one with British pounds, they didn't offer one with NZ notes, and I didn't like any of their other designs, so I was a bit flustered until I discovered you could design your own.

This is what I put together:

The laser kiwi is obvious, but why a $5 note instead of, say, a $50 or $100 note?  Well, for starters, it has Sir Edmund Hillary, of Mount Everest fame, who is a lot more recognisable than Kate Sheppard ($10), Sir Apirana Ngata ($50) and Ernest, Lord Rutherford of Nelson ($100).  Plus it won best banknote of the year, 2015 (seriously!)  But the main reason is that the $20 note has a truly awful photo of Queen Elizabeth II, and as much as I adore the Queen I couldn't bear to look at that regularly.

* I once told an ex-girlfriend I'd never been pickpocketed, and she pickpocketed me!  So I really have to qualify that by saying I've never been pickpocketed by anyone who wasn't kissing me at the time.