I Found Your Phone

In a part of Queens which is busy during the week but desolate and quiet on holidays and weekends I saw a cell phone sitting in the middle of the street. It was Saturday.

I picked up the phone and pressed a couple of buttons. When nothing happened I assumed this bedraggled brick of technology no longer worked. It looked like it had been run over, but it was all in one piece.

I stuck it in my pocket and decided to try it again later. When I did I found that the phone turned on all right, I just had to hold one of the buttons down for a few seconds for that to happen. The image of a young woman’s face appeared on the phone.

The battery indicator (first thing I looked for) showed that this phone had 75% of its power left. Good. It was too bright outside for me to see or figure out the interface for this phone, so I waited until I got home to try and communicate with whoever was last on the call log.

I tried to send a text message to someone named Liz:

Do You Know…

I hit send:

Sending…

But it failed, returning this irritatingly unhelpful message:

Try Again?

At first I thought this was just your run-of-the-mill unhelpful computer-generated error message (I’ve been seeing a lot of those lately). But after trying to send another text I figured the phone had probably already been reported lost and thus disabled by the carrier — which is still no obvious excuse for such an opaque error message.

I don’t know why I defaulted to sending text messages to people versus calling them. My aversion to human contact likely had something to do with it.

Nevertheless I tried to call Liz but instead of connecting with her I was introduced to a customer service rep at T-Mobile. I realized that, of course, the phone had been disabled save for contact with the carrier and (I assume) 911 service.

I told the gentleman at T-Mobile that I just found this phone on the street and that I wanted to get it back to its owner.

I was awarded some flattering comments from the T-Mobile representative, who then told me he would see if he could make a connection to the rightful owner of this phone.

Within seconds I was connected with someone who clearly could not believe what he was hearing. “Are you fuckin’ serious? Where’d you find it? Man, that’s my wife’s phone.”

Other expressions of miraculousness followed and then he said “Man, I appreciate the fuck outta this.” He gave me his phone number in case we lost contact, saying “Name the place, man, anywhere you want, I’ll be there.” I named an intersection near here, telling him I would be at the Getty station there in 15 minutes, or 4:15pm.

I walked around the block and passed a bar/restaurant that I frequent. The place was just opening for the day. The owner there is a friend, and when I told her what was happening she offered to go with me as backup in case this was a homicidal lunatic who “lost” cell phones as a setup for kidnapping and murdering Good Samaritans.

We got in her car and drove to the Getty Station, parking in the lot for about 10 minutes until we got kicked out and had to park across the street.

The dude showed up at about 4:25. I waved from across the street, holding the phone up to see if he recognized it. He did. I crossed the street to hand it to him.

He kept saying “You da man, buddy, you da MAN!” He was a big guy, Hispanic, probably 6-feet tall and over 200 pounds. I thought he was going to hug me.

He asked again where I found it. I told him exactly where. He thrust $20 at me. I tried to refuse but he insisted I take it and I didn’t want to spoil his joy by turning him down.

That was it. I didn’t get his name, he didn’t get mine, and everyone was happy. I thanked my friend for backing me up and everybody went home. It was nice, this random contact with someone whose path I would probably never cross.