You lick it, you keep it

Some encounters are almost too strange to believe.  That doesn’t make them any less real.

I was walking down the street in San Francisco at lunch time Friday afternoon.  As I came up to a busy street corner I saw a paper grocery bag sitting on a bench with no one around it.  I walked up to the bag and peeked in to find three external hard drives, one Maxtor and two brands I didn’t recognize.  The drives looked like they were either well used or the product of a dumpster dive.  I knocked on the door of the one business nearby, but no one answered.  After a few minutes someone came out who worked in the building; he said there’d been a break-in recently but that he didn’t know anything about the drives.  I tried to call Rich for advice, but he was busy so I decided I’d finish my walk to lunch and think on the situation for a little while.

One burrito later, I walked up on the scene again.  This time a homeless man in dirty, ripped slacks was surveying the bag of hard drives.  He looked around much like I had done thirty minutes earlier, then scuttled up to the bag and pulled out one of the external hard drives.  After sniffing it for a second, he licked one side of the drive and put it back in the bag.  He then ran over to a parking meter and licked it, licked the taillights on both sides of an SUV and vanished from my sight behind the car. 

I lost any interest in the hard drives at that point.  That takes mom’s caution of “you don’t know where that’s been” to a whole new level.

Saliva incident aside, what would you do if you found a bag of hard drives in a park or public place?  Calling 911 didn’t seem appropriate, though there is a slim possiblity of explosives.  Taking the drives home and performing some forensics research on them crossed my mind; I have the technology if not much skill in the area.  I tried to turn them in to the business, but there was no one there.  I guess the gentlemen with the inquisitive taste buds saved me from a moral dilema. 

What would you have done?