On Tuesday, Kelly Andrews woke up, brushed her teeth, and left her dorm room for class. It was just like any other Tuesday. But then disaster struck.
“They must have fallen out of my pocket while I was biking through the quad,” said a visibly shaken Andrews, “I reached into my pocket, and… they weren’t there.” She was no longer in possession of her keychain.
Andrews decided to post about her lost keys on Facebook. The community responded.
Within minutes, a Facebook group emerged. Within hours, the group had gained thousands of members and “#LostKeys” was trending on Twitter. After President Obama was briefed, he decided to hold a press conference, meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and raise the DEFCON level from 5 to 4.
“This is a really, really big deal,” said White House press secretary Jay Carney.
By nightfall, a sizable crowd had assembled in the quad. Men, women, and children, students and faculty, undergraduates and graduates alike, had banded together to search for the missing keys. Members of the search party were interviewed.
“I had to help,” said sophomore Kristin Pratt. “I just couldn’t live with myself knowing that somewhere on campus, a girl was without her keys.”
“To be honest, it’s all a blur. I remember getting a text from AlertSU, and then running for the door,” said grad student Clint Forney, “The next thing I know, I was in a sea of people and I was carrying a torch. Someone shouted, ‘TO THE QUAD!!’ I knew what we had to do, what needed to be done.”
