Humans are squishy, flawed creatures. Our imperfections are part of what makes us so interesting! But the little things that make us human can also be a real pain in the backside. Sometimes you might put something on top of your car and then proceed to forget it’s there. Who knows how far you might drive before you realize you’ve screwed up. Have you ever left something on top of your car? If so, what did you lose?
I am a very forgetful person. I can take down an important note in my head one minute and forget it the next minute. Sometimes it’s unimportant stuff, like a song I just heard, and sometimes it’s something important, like the date of my niece’s birthday party. Sorry, Porsche (not her real name). I’ve also forgotten more awesome headlines and story ideas than I’m willing to admit.
Thankfully, I combat that nowadays by jotting things down in a notes app as soon as things come to mind. Sadly, I guess I don’t do that for forgetting things on top of cars.
So far as I can remember, I’ve thus far left a phone on my car’s roof twice and a debit card on my roof twice. The worst one happened last year when I took a road trip to Florida in my old 2010 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen TDI. I stopped at the Buc-ee’s in Calhoun, Georgia, snapping the picture below. I didn’t get fuel here, but a brisket sandwich and some Red Bull. I then proceeded to drive about 200 miles south, making it well past Atlanta.
As I was jamming out to some tunes and troubleshooting an underboost issue, it hit me that I didn’t remember where I put my card. Ah, “it’s fine,” I thought, I’ll just stick my hand in my purse’s card slot and it’ll be there. Uh oh.
Panic slowly crept in. I was carving some curves earlier, maybe I tossed the card on the floor? I searched the entire car and found nothing. That’s when I made a startling realization. I most likely left the card on the roof while I left that Buc-ee’s. But it was now around three hours later and around 180 miles of distance. I then looked at the fuel gauge in the Jetta. It showed that if I turned around right away, I’d make it back to the Buc-ee’s with only 20 miles of range to spare. Those gauges are notoriously incorrect and the car’s turbo wasn’t boosting as it should have been, but I technically had enough fuel to make it.
I called my wife, turned around, and drove the slowest, quietest highway drive of my life. If that card wasn’t there I was boned. I already accidentally forgot my credit card and emergency cash at home and I was traveling solo in an area where I had no relatives and no friends. Sure, I could have used my phone for any NFC-based transactions, but that wasn’t going to work for a hotel room.
Those 180 miles felt like they could have been 1,800 miles. When I arrived at the Buc-ee’s, the Jetta’s range estimator showed a big fat zero miles. None of the employees saw my card and it wasn’t at the pump, either. In my desperation, I also searched the trash cans, even though I knew they had been emptied.
I got so desperate that I started searching the street leading from the Buc-ee’s to the interstate (above). Sure enough, I saw my card sitting in the middle of a frontage road.
It had gotten run over by countless cars, but it was in ok shape and nobody spent a dime. The Buc-ee’s people were shocked. Let’s say I’ve since made sure something like that never happened again.
[Editor’s Note: I’m not sure this counts, but I once lost an entire re-upholstered armchair from the roof of my Beetle. 
And I know we’ve all driven off with beverages on our roofs, but I happen to have me doing so on video:
View this post on Instagram
Man, that’s embarassing. – JT]
How about you? What have you lost on top of your car?
Multiple locking gas caps from the Scouts. Not technically on the roof—I used to put it on the bedrail while I was filling up. Usually I’ll pop the hood and check the oil and fluids, and with ADHD I find it easy to lose track of my thought process. After losing the second one, I replaced it and got in the habit of leaving my keyring in the cap so that I can’t drive away without putting the cap back on.
A pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses that I loved. They slid off the roof at a sharp curve on a very narrow highway on-ramp. There was no way I could safely retrieve them. The kicker is that it was on a route I took when leaving from work every day. So I had the opportunity to watch them slowly break down every day over the course of a month or so.
Not the roof but once left a library book and 36oz Yeti water bottle on my tonneau cover. Realized what I did when I got to work. When I got back home a few blocks away I found parts of the book all over but no sign of the water bottle.
Yeah, and I bet “Bookman” the library cop would have been on the case!
Only once, it was a free used pizza, supreme pizza.
…used pizza?
“If you want nice fresh oats you have to pay a fair price. If you can be satisfied with oats that have already been thru the horse, that comes a little cheaper.”
Can’t recall when I have, but my wife… yeah. Many times, many things.
It was July 4th. Maybe 20 years ago. My wife and I were going to my parent’s beach house to watch the fireworks with them and enjoy a barbecue. We painstakingly crafty the most American pie you’ve ever seen. The pie crust had one section full of blueberries, one section full of strawberries, and whipped cream, all shaped in the red-white-and-blue of the American flag. We obsessed over this piece of all-American dessert perfection. We carefully placed it on the roof of our oh-so-American 2000 Mercury Sable wagon while we loaded the kids in the back seats.
Then we drove off with the pie still in the roof. That pie had some American tenacity as it managed to stay on the roof for roughly three blocks before it flew into the street, leaving an epic red, white and blue stain on the pavement.
Tools. How many times I’ve worked on my car, gotten excited to take the car for a test drive only to have left a screw driver or a wrench on the car and it fall onto the road as I’m driving away. At least most of the time they end up on the floor in front of my house since I’d have just backed out of my driveway.
An entire sheet of drywall on top of my Taurus wagon. Obviously I didn’t forget it, I tied it on there, but this was the day I regretted skipping physics in high school.
I left a take-and-bake Costco pizza on the roof. Drove 30m home, then my wife (who was 8-months pregnant) asked when the pizza would be ready. Funnily, on the way back to Costco for another pizza, I never saw the first one; I guess someone grabbed it.
I drove off with an iPad pro on the roof and all ended well.
I borrowed the iPad to test an application I was working on and I needed to send it back from Spain where I was to Holland. I arranged a courier to pick it up at the office where I was working. It had to be in the morning, because my girlfriends best friends who we hadn’t seen for a long time were in town and coming over for lunch and I had to be The Good Boyfriend.
However, the courier didn’t show up. So I called the delivery company and was met with a computer that asked for the order number which was something like kjhef9832hf9lsadh. Problem is, with my dutch accent it did not recognize the letters I said. So after shouting letters and numbers in the phone various times with various accents I finally got through to an human operator. And then the connection broke, so I had to do it all again. As I was getting late and about to lose my Good Boyfriend Points, decided to leave it and go home.
Pretty frustrated I walked to the car, laptop bag in one hand and box with iPad in the other to realize that the car key was somewhere in the bag an not in my pocket. So put the box on the roof, found the key, got into the car, send a text that was on the way, opened the window because it was hot and I drove off.
After about 50 meters I heard a strange sound and glanced in the mirror. There was the box on the street.
I was so glad that I saw it and that it was packed very good. Later that day I went to the post office to send it and it arrived in time back to the owner without damage.
Finally I was a bit late for lunch, but didn’t loose the Good Boyfriend Points.
I’ve only done it once (that I know of!) but I did it big – obligatory stainless coffee mug, a surprisingly expensive library book and my first-ever pair of prescription sunglasses that I’d picked up the weekend before.
Saw the book fly off into the scrub beside the on-ramp in the rear view and immediately realized what else had been up there with it. What a sickening feeling.
Yeah, and I bet “Bookman” the library cop would have been on the case!
Gas caps. Probably at least 2 or 3 of them. I always replace them with a tethered one if available. I’ve also did left the wireless remote to my winch on the fender of my trailer, and a water bottle on the rear bumper of my truck (which someone pointed out to me, but they worded it in a way where it didn’t register what they actually meant).
Created an account just to comment on this. Absolutely true story.
The year was 2003, and I lived in a 50-year-old, 1-bedroom, 480 sq ft trailer in a mobile home court. The previous year, we had successfully unionized the local auto parts factory (making parts for the then-new Jeep Liberty) and I was making 20/hr for the first time in my life. I was 25 and felt like I was king of the world.
Our first child was nearly 4 years old, and the 1 bedroom trailer wasn’t going to cut it anymore. So, armed with this new union salary, I decided to buy my first house, a 4 bedroom in a small town about 10 miles away.
Soon, the big day arrived for the mortgage signing. I finally got to the bank, and realized that I had (gulp) forgotten all of my mortgage paperwork!! This was still in the analog times, there were no e-documents to sign. The paperwork was all I had, and I had lost it.
Panicked, I drove back to the trailer court and looked all around for the documents but came up empty. Closing was mere days away and it was all falling apart. Then, it dawned on me… I had left the folder containing all of the paperwork on to roof my car, a 1994 Ford Taurus SHO (loved that thing!).
Thinking that the docs were strewed all along the road somewhere, I started slowly driving around the trailer court, hoping to find at least something. I hadn’t even begun to think about other factors such as identity theft or the like, I was just worried about losing the house.
My Taurus was known around the trailer court, and as I was slowly driving around, the resident of the trailer at the court’s exit to the main road came out of her door and asked if I had lost something(!!).
She had picked up EVERY SINGLE paper strewn around the road and gathered it all together, and waited for me to return. Such a saint. Could not thank her enough for this miracle. All the documents were in order with none missing. I returned to the bank that day, closed the mortgage, and got the house.
I still miss that Taurus SHO, but I’ve come a long way and these days I own a 2019 CTS VSport and am currently leasing an AWD Lyriq. And I have never left anything on the roof of my car again!
I lost the radio front of my carradio from the roof, probably. 20 yrs ago it was normal to take off the front of your carradio and take it with you in the house. I lived in Amsterdam and it was best not to leave anything in your car. While exiting the car I must have placed it on the roof to get other stuff from the car. Next day it was gone.
I’ve never left anything important up there, thankfully, nor failed to adequately secure whatever I’ve transported that way. Not to jinx myself… I’ll at least manage to forget a thermos or some leftovers until I hear or see them fall off for the first time in ages now.
On the other hand, I once spotted a phone on the side of the road and managed to return it to its owner in the supermarket parking lot up the street via their provider’s customer service; sadly for them, the display was properly busted, but happily it wasn’t a particularly expensive phone, so it was probably just a closure thing. (They’d left it on their tailgate and made it out to the state highway.)
Oil cap. My MR2 had a head-gasket related oil leak, so I was topping it up, got distracted and shut the engine cover without replacing it.
There was an even stronger than usual smell of hot oil after my next drive. Such an idiot.
Gas cap, gas cap, gas cap, gas cap, box and receipt for gas cap w/ tether, jumpstart pack storage pouch.
Nothing, ever.
I thought people just did this on TV.
Same here. But I never put anything on top of my car anyway. Just my habits, I guess.
giant candied apple. I distinctly remember leaving with it from the holiday party at my first job. But I never saw it again.
Aside from some leftovers or an ice scraper or two, the one thing that sticks in my mind was the cargo area cover for my wife’s Prius.
Kicker is: she set it on the roof a day earlier before we got a light dusting of snow, and I didn’t notice it until I hit the freeway, and in the review mirror, saw a flash of gray vinyl flapping away off into the ditch.
I was confused as to what I saw until hours later when I returned home, and started describing what had transpired. She immediately remembered she had set the cover on the roof, but forgot about it (Her Prius is frequently used to haul stuff and the cover was previously removed and replaced dozens of times).
Roughly 30 years ago, this J.R. “Bob” Dobbs mug flew off the roof my car at the first turn past where I was living at the time. By a [throat warble] miracle Slack prevailed, I found all the pieces and glued it all back up.
PRAISE “BOB”
Reading the headline, I just have to ask, any of you ever watch Raising Arizona?
(Two men screaming. Brakes stomped on, tires locking up.)
Then the biker from hell rides up. Kid took one hell of a ride.
The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse!!!
We ain’t Ozzie and Harriet.
Yeah, totally classic movie!
(Just watched it again recently)
I used to have a powerful magnet. On long car trips I would put the magnet inside a paper cup or inside an empty pack of cigarettes, and stick it to the roof of my car. I always ran with the CB radio and would get all kinds of wild comments as I sped down the road with something stuck on the roof of my car One day it blew off and I never saw it again
How a whole truck canopy? Since my truck is a coach-built ’64 F100 crewcab, there exists no store-bought canopy. Shortly after dad bought the truck he made a plywood top for the bed. Soon thereafter he lifted it to create a canopy with a canvas door flap. He and my brother drove to the Sacramento City College to play some tennis. When they came out afterwards to go home, the canopy was gone. They suspected some of dad’s students had taken it as a prank, but that hadn’t happened. They looked over the entire path home and found not a trace of light blue pieces of plywood either. to this day, we all say the “hand of god” removed the canopy.
Only thing I’ve forgotten on the roof was the ice scrapper, which didn’t even make it to the end of the driveway. I heard it slide off and immediately crunch.
The one I got away with, though: I left my well out of production Craftsman pass through socket wrench on the air cleaner of my Oldsmobile. Somehow, it didn’t budge and I found it when I stopped twelve miles later.
I’ve drove all day, like 10 hours, and then stopped and find my wrench on the bumper pick up truck