iPhone Lost and Found - a true story that was mostly written 6 years ago
/I originally wrote this right after it happened, Thanksgiving weekend of 2010. I never mustered the motivation to finish it up and put it out there at the time. I finally decided to finish and post the damn thing.
My friend decided that for her birthday we would all have dinner and see Harry Potter 7.1. Of all places she could have chosen for dinner and a movie on Friday, she chose the mall. Not just any mall, the only mall of its caliber for more than 10 miles. And not just any Friday – BLACK FRIDAY. My friend’s husband (the organizer of this expedition) when questioned on the wisdom of the chosen location, said “Yeah I figure will just stop in at the Cheesecake Factory and then catch the next available showing of Harry Potter after dinner.” The more experienced Black Friday veterans in the crowd proceeded to explain to the rookie just how impossible going into this evening without a plan would be. The vets looked hollow-eyed as they recalled the horrors of Black Fridays past. Eventually cooler heads prevailed and our friend was persuaded to make reservations for both dinner and the movie.
The six of us went to dinner at 5PM and were seated immediately. Surprisingly the mall doesn’t seem nearly as crowded as I might have expected. More crowded than normal surely, but not the mob scene it has been in years past. Insert cliché pessimistic assessment of current economy here. As dinner begins, someone idly mentions that Find My iPhone is free now. Dinner continues as normal with the lively conversation and middling food coming in due course as expected. Towards the end of the meal, during the figuring out the bill/people running to the bathroom phase, I quietly install and set up the Find My iPhone app. I check it out for a minute, see what it looks like, and wonder to myself if this might really work if the phone was lost or stolen.
So far the evening is going really well, the crowds aren’t nearly as bad as I expected and we are all having a great time. The movie starts at 8:15PM so we wander over about 8 so we can get our drinks and popcorn and get situated. This particular theater is a Muvico. I am in love with this theater because it is the closest one to my house that has assigned seating, showings for age 21 and over, and allows me to drink beer so even if the movie sucks I just drink more and it stops sucking. All theaters should be so equipped. On my way to the theater, I walk through the bar and find myself watching the end of the Lakers game. The Lakers are up by three, then the game is tied, then they are down by two. The officiating staff can’t get the shot clock to function properly, but refuse to turn it off altogether, so the last three minutes of the game are a complete farce in which the refs constantly break the Lakers’ concentration and momentum and they lose by six. The evening was going so well, so I figured something was going to go wrong and this must be it.
I check the time on my iPhone, and realize that the movie is starting, my wife and friends are probably curious as to my whereabouts, and I desperately need to evacuate my bowels. I make a beeline for the facilities and find an open stall. I do my business and check my email, as you do. I finish up, wash my hands, and dash to my seat.
I come into the movie about 10 minutes in. I’ve seen it before, so no big deal. Harry and friends receive gifts from the (spoiler alert) late Dumbledore. They run away from death eaters. They run some more. They escape the ministry. Ron gets mad and leaves. Right around the time Harry and Hermione are dancing to some Nick Cave on the radio, I reach into my pocket to check the time on my phone. I feel around for a second. Then I realize something. The iPhone is large enough that I shouldn’t have to feel around for it. My brain starts into gear. It’s not in my pocket. Where is my phone? Fell on the ground? I dive onto the floor to inspect under the seat… which you will agree was a very rash move if you have seen the floor of a movie theater lately, but I was panicked. Nothing there either. I get back in my seat. I think. THE BAR. I was sitting in the bar. I dash out to where I was sitting. People in the bar are looking at me funny… I realize I’m dashing around like a madman. I try to calm myself. I approach the bar casually, trying to appear sane. If movies have taught me anything, it’s that bartenders always have a gun or a bat under the bar, ready for any monkey business.
I say to the bartender, “I’m not up to any monkey business.”
Her hand edges under the bar. “What can I help you with?”
“Well, I was out here earlier watching the game and realized I must have left my phone lying around. Anyone turn one in?”
“Sure. Describe your phone.” She starts digging around under the bar in some kind of lost and found bin.
“Well it’s a black iPhone4.”
She stops digging. “No one turned anything like that in.” Her tone is now one of pity. “You might try asking the information desk, or the kiosks downstairs.” She doesn’t look or sound encouraging.
“Thanks. I’ll check around.”
Careful readers are probably already yelling at their screen how stupid I am, just look at the last paragraph where you said you looked at your email in the bathroom, STUPID. Well, I’m no Norman Einstein, but at least I know enough not to yell at COMPUTERS. I can’t even hear you probably. Unless you’re my neighbor, or that creepy lady who comes around every Tuesday to prowl through the garbage bins in the alley for recyclables so she can feed her family. Really she’s very nice, like the old street salter guy from Home Alone, but I won’t know that until I run into a church in a panic and find out she’s really nice after all, just on hard times and has a shaky relationship with her son, and her granddaughter is a choir singer, would you imagine that? Later she’ll save me from some kind of home invasion scenario which to any other person would be TERRIFYING but not for Macaulay “Rambo” Culkin.
So yes, I actually run to the bathroom to check the stall where I left my dinner and my phone. With no doubt in my mind, I know I left it right on the convenient mini-table/toilet paper dispenser.
Predictably, the phone is no longer there. I quickly make a beeline to the information kiosk. No dice. The kid working here has a smirk on his bespecked face like I’m an idiot for even asking, and maybe I am, but I’ll be damned if I just resign myself to paying hundreds of dollars out of pocket for a replacement.
I make one last ditch effort at the concession stand, and strike out there, too. This kid is less spotty but still smirks at me. I fucking hate teenagers, they are the worst people in the world. I’m 99% sure that a teenager stole my phone and they are all goddamned in on it, that’s why they’re all smirking. Shitheels.
I wander back to the theater, to catch the end of the movie. I get there in time to see most of the battle at Malfoy Manor, then (spoiler alert) Dobby dies and the movie ends. Our group wanders out of the theater. They start asking me why I dashed out of the theater. I explain it to them. Oh man, they say, so sorry dude, that sucks. They all talk in unison like a Sophoclean Greek chorus. My friends are weird. Another brainwave hits me - I grab my wife’s phone, and install the find my iPhone app, figuring maybe I can get a location lock on my phone. It works! Kind of. The conspiracy of teenagers[1] that stole my phone were at least smart enough to turn it off. The app gives me the last known location, and the time that it was last “seen” by the service – here in the theater, and around ten minutes after I finished evacuating my bowels. This information is not useful to me – essentially telling me what I already know. I click my phone. I can still give the following remote commands, to be executed the next time the phone is turned on:
- Display Message or Play Sound
- Remote Lock
- Remote Wipe
I use the first two, sending the following “Please return phone. Reward offered, no questions asked. Call (XXX) XXX-XXXX[2]” and remotely locking it, using the same highly super secret password I use for all my accounts: 1234. That’s right – the Fibonacci sequence.
The company parts ways. At this point I am almost certain that I am never going to see my poor phone again, by now disappeared into the underground phone black market. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was half way to one of those opium dens you see in the movies, where a bunch of old bearded guys are interrupted from their hookahs by little street urchins paying their dues by handing over their daily haul to the grizzled, one-eyed, double hook-handed kingpin. How the hell is that guy even going to be able to use my phone with no fingers? Greedy fuck.
I leave the theater, resigned to check in on the phone intermittently, no real hope of being reunited with her. I ask my wife if she could possibly imagine my hurt, being separated from the only thing I truly love in this world, and can she just hold me for a minute? It turns out she can’t and she won’t, crossing her arms at me and glaring. She’s so emotionally unavailable sometimes. We head home and I check the MobileMe [3]website one last time. Nothing. I head to bed.
I wake up at 7am with my alarm, and head over to my computer to check and see if MobileMe has any news for me. Lo and behold, someone turned my phone on at 2:12AM, and I got a lock on a location in a neighborhood not far from the theater. I ponder the wisdom of knocking on random doors in a strange neighborhood. My mind wanders to the double-hook handed bandit lord. I examine the satellite images. The houses look like nice little suburbanite homes, the kind that it would be no problem for a troupe of girl scouts selling cookies to skip from door to door without a care in the world. “I’m bigger than a girl scout,” I think to myself, “and I’m selling vengeance.”
I decide against showing up dressed like Batman to sell vengeance, and instead go in shorts and a t-shirt to beg for my phone back. I call Johnny. He groggily answers and reluctantly agrees to help confront these malefactors with me. We come up with a basic script while my wife plays games on a Nintendo DS in the back seat. We settle on something like the following:
“Hi, I was at the Muvico Theater last night, and I lost my phone, which has a GPS location service on it that allows me to track its current location, which is this neighborhood, in one of the 5 or 6 houses around this particular area. Did you happen to find a phone last night? I’m offering a reward, no questions asked.”
Short, to the point, and likely to cover any questions they may have. The first few doors we knock on are pretty friendly, although they are pretty quick to point the finger at some of their neighbors, who have teenage kids that are “troublemakers.” I think they are as troubled by the idea of a thief in the midst of their perfect little neighborhood as I am by the fact that they would literally rat out their neighbors to a total stranger.
One such domicile, purportedly the home of several underage ne’er-do-wells, was answered by what I assume was their father. He had long matted hair, and answered the door in his boxer briefs and and an open terry-cloth robe. Besides looking about as credible as any vagabond you might find under a newspaper, he seemed nice enough and assured me that his kids hadn’t been at the theater, but pointed me one door down. I knocked several times, a good 30 seconds passed and Johnny and I were ready to assume nobody was home, when a woman called through the door, “Who is it?”
Johnny and I looked at each other perplexed… did she expect to get robbed by someone knocking on random doors in broad daylight in a place where the police force normally have so little policing to do that they harass teenagers most nights? I guess she did.
“My name is Nate, and I lost my phone last night at the movie theater. It has a GPS on it and I tracked it down to this area. Did anyone in your house go to the movies last night and find a phone? I’m offering a reward, and no questions asked.” There was momentary silence, then, “Let me check, stay right there.” A minute or so passes, punctuated by the muffled sounds of this woman yelling at her daughter, and her daughter yelling back.
“You were out last night with that boy again, did you steal a phone? IS THAT WHAT YOU DO NOW? GO OUT AND STEAL PHONES?”
“HIS NAME IS JARED, AND HE ISN’T A THIEF! I HATE YOU! YOU ARE THE WORST MOM EVER!”
Footsteps, then politely: “No, I’m sorry, no one here has found a phone.”
Defeat. We had basically spent a couple hours wandering around this neighborhood and bothering people to no avail. We decided to take a break and get something to eat. We settled on the traditional breakfast of English detectives, egg and bean burritos. It was as I took my first bite that I had a thought. “What if we go to Kinko’s and print up 20 flyers and shove them in mail boxes?” Johnny and Karin mulled it over. “That could work… it’s worth a try anyways.”
We finished our meal and paid, and went to the nearest Kinko’s. I bought time on their computer at an outrageous $5/15 minute rate. I quickly typed up the following:
LOST iPHONE 4. REWARD OFFERED $$$
I lost my phone at the movie theater last night (11/26). This phone is important to me, and has personal information and family pictures with sentimental value. I am offering a reward, no questions asked. Please call XXX-XXX-XXXX[2] if you have any information.
Thank you and God bless.[4] Nate
It’s amazing how fast you can think and type when you have to pay extortionate rates to sit in front of the computer. I should have written every college paper at Kinko’s, I would have finished them so much faster. I printed the copies of the above message, paid the tab, and high tailed it back to the neighborhood where my phone was being held hostage. As planned, we stuffed the message into every mail box up and down the street where my iPhone last checked in.
And that was it, time to wait. We headed back to Simi Valley and to the mechanics to pick up Karin’s car from getting an oil change and the motor mounts replaced because 2007 Nissan Sentras have crappy motor mounts and Karin likes to drive over speed bumps like some bitter former police detective strapped a bomb to her car that goes off if she drops under 50mph.
No sooner did we get to the mechanics did Karin’s phone ring. This was 20 minutes TOPS after we dropped those fliers off.
“Hello, is this Nate?” The voice was a little squeaky, and I immediately pictured a spotty 13 year-old boy on the other end of the telephone. In the background I could hear what was clearly his mother yelling at him - “Tell him you have his phone, and you are returning it as SOON AS POSSIBLE.” Yikes.
“This is Nate, what can I do for you?”
“I think I have your iPhone, and I’d like to return it” and then muffled as though the receiver was being covered with his hand, “I’M TELLING HIM MOM, LEAVE ME ALONE I TOLD YOU I WOULD RETURN THE PHONE!!”
And immediately everything snapped into place, and I could picture exactly what had happened to my phone. Left in the toilet stall, picked up by this teenager thinking sweet, free phone, going home from the theater, his mom asking where the phone that he clearly could not afford to have bought for himself came from, “My friend forgot it so I’m holding it for him”, mom buying the transparent lie[5] and moving on with her life. Until about 11am the next morning - when she went out to get the mail and found a flyer that clearly explained that her son had found an expensive phone, lied to her about it, and probably intended on keeping it.
And so it was that I found myself driving straight back to Thousand Oaks, meeting in the lobby of the same theater where the story began.[6] Waiting there, I’m wondering how I’ll be able to recognize the phone thief finder, until the moment that he and his mom walk in, at which point it is excruciatingly obvious. The mom is prodding the doughy, spotty lad forward and looking around, and I approach, confident they are looking for me.
“Hi are you Nate?” Why yes, yes I am.
“That’s me!” I smile. He starts to hand the phone over, but his mom stops him, and looks at me suspiciously. “How do we know this is really your phone?”
I am more than a bit taken aback. How could it NOT be my phone? Does she think that I somehow engineered this scenario? That seems like an incredible leap on her part until I realize anyone could put fliers out claiming a lost phone. It’s kind of deviously brilliant actually. I wonder if I just stuff fliers in mailboxes every weekend, every lost phone will just get returned to me. Turns out she’s got a talent for creating secret nefarious phone stealing masterplans and doesn’t even realize it.
“Well, I can tell you the lockscreen background is a stormtrooper, and I can show you that I have the password to unlock the phone…” She clearly doesn’t understand what I am talking about, but I turn the phone on, and confirm that it has the described picture, and I know the password to the phone… this seems to satisfy her.
“Well thanks for returning my phone, let me give you the cash reward!” I reach into my pocket and pull out $100.
The kid looks at the money longingly, glances nervously at his mom, who returns his gaze with a hard flat look. He looks back at me, dejected. “No thank you, doing the right thing is reward enough.” It clearly is not.
“Are you sure? I insist!” Fair is fair after all, I promised a cash reward and I would easily be laying out hundreds of dollars for a new one if they hadn’t returned my phone. He looks back at his mom whose expression, impossibly, hardens further.
“No, thank you. Just glad to help.”[7]
I smile, fold the bills and put them back in my pocket. “Well if you’re sure.” I can tell that I’m just torturing him now. I thank them, offer my hand. They shake it in turn and head for the door. I can hear him grumbling to his mother and his mother grumbling back.
And that’s how my phone was lost and found.[8]
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Shitheels. ↩
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I used my wife’s cell number and don’t think she’d be pleased if I made that public info all over the internet, because you are all animals. Although it might be funnier if I just put it right there and see what kind of random calls she gets. Maybe not. ↩
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That’s how long ago I originally started writing this. iPhone4. MobileMe. I work slow. Started writing this in 2010. Finished December of 2016… Jesus. ↩
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I am not particularly religious, but I lived in a middle to upper-middle class area in Southern California and most people are religious so I cynically included this sign-off to shamelessly play to my imagined audience. I am not proud of this. ↩
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We all want to believe the best of our little shitheels. Now that I have kids of my own, even though I didn’t when I started writing this piece (I really should get my act together), I completely understand the urge to rationalize the shitty things they do and keep on pretending that they are perfect. Because if they aren’t perfect, then you might not have parented perfectly, and living with the guilt of that is REALLY HARD. ↩
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something something time is a flat circle ↩
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He’s not. ↩
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The very first day that the feature launched! Man I’ll bet if I published this 6 years ago it would have been a REALLY popular post. ↩