September 10, 2026 at 7:55 am

Customer Couldn’t Find His Phone—Then a Worker Helped Him Find It in the Bathroom

by Matthew Gilligan

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If you work in the customer service world, you know that there are gonna be good days and bad days…

And there are also gonna be some WEIRD days from time to time!

You just never know, do ya?

In today’s story, a store worker explained how he reunited a customer with something he’d lost that he just couldn’t live without.

Read on, and see what you think.

Bathroom struggles.

“I was putting out plastic containers in the back corner of our store, right near the bathroom, and a customer says, “excuse me, can you help me open the bathroom door?”

I look over and he has the key, so I’m not yet understanding the problem, but I say okay and take the key.

I go up to the door, and hear someone inside, so I stop and say there’s someone in there.

the guy explained what he was really trying to do.

The guy says, “yeah I know, I’m trying to open the other bathroom.”

I then tell him that’s the employee bathroom, and it doesn’t use this key.

But rather than have to wait or reflect, or learn something, the previous customer came out then, and so he got to use the correct one.

What was with this guy…?

The same guy came back about an hour later, and had lost his phone.

He had our cashier call it but couldn’t hear it anywhere.

They asked me to check the bathroom.

He and I go in, and he says, “nope, looks like it’s not here.”

Hallelujah!

I looked over the edge of the trash can and there it was, pressed against the closest side of the can.

He starts saying, “you saved my life, I never would have found it! How did you do that?”

Dude, I play seeing-eye-dog for our customers/products all day, this kind of thing happens a lot!

Usually it’s with products people are standing directly in front of but ask me the location of anyway, and not phones, but yes, phones too sometimes…”

Check out how readers reacted on Reddit.

This person weighed in.

Screenshot 2026 08 17 at 11.53.18 AM Customer Couldn’t Find His Phone—Then a Worker Helped Him Find It in the Bathroom

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a widow who returned to a store to thank employees for their kindness to her late husband.

And another Reddit user shared their thoughts.

Screenshot 2026 08 17 at 11.53.35 AM 1 Customer Couldn’t Find His Phone—Then a Worker Helped Him Find It in the Bathroom

This guy wasn’t about to leave without that phone…

Heck, they could’ve been there searching all night.

That was a close one!

Well, he did his good deed for the month!

Enjoyed this story?

Readers who liked this also read this story about a customer who tried to skip the checkout line but didn’t get their way.
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