{"id":764,"date":"2010-04-05T15:38:52","date_gmt":"2010-04-05T19:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=764"},"modified":"2021-10-18T19:00:25","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T23:00:25","slug":"i-found-your-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2010\/04\/05\/i-found-your-phone.html","title":{"rendered":"I Found Your Phone"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I tried to send a text message to someone named Liz:<\/p>\n

\"Do

Do You Know…<\/p><\/div>\n

I hit send:<\/p>\n

\"Sending...\"

Sending…<\/p><\/div>\n

But it failed, returning this irritatingly unhelpful message:<\/p>\n

\"Try

Try Again?<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

Other expressions of miraculousness followed and then he said “Man, I appreciate the fuck<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-181-2","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/IMG_9823-1024x768-1.jpg?fit=1024%2C768&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-ck","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=764"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29539,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764\/revisions\/29539"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}