Been spending too much time in international airports lately. Went to Rome yesterday. And left my mobile phone on the back seat of a taxi last night. It was seriously depressing in the hour or so afterwards. The concierge at the hotel tried all he could to trace the taxi driver – but couldn’t.
I paced up and down my hotel room wondering what on earth I should do. Called my mobile phone several times in the hope that the taxi driver would see the phone glowing on the back seat (I had left in silent-vibrate mode you see) – but to no avail. I had no choice but to call up the network operator to get the SIM disabled – and this was a challenge, as I had no idea what number to call – and in fact I had no idea of ANY numbers to call because they were all in the memory of my phone! This was the most distressing thing – as it was only at a time like this that I realised how utterly helpless I was without my mobile phone; I didn’t know ANY telephone numbers except my own mobile and my home landline phone! I didn’t even know what the number for International Directory Enquiries was!
In the end – I connected my laptop to the hotel room’s high-speed Internet connection – and went on the network operator’s website to get hold of the 24-hour “lost and stolen” number – and they disabled the phone for me. Luckily I had another mobile phone with me – so I wasn’t incommunicado – but it was practically useless – as it didn’t have any of my contact numbers in the address book – and nobody knows the number of that phone anyway. Totally useless. It was an anxious couple of hours – but I finally resigned myself to the fact that I had actually lost my phone for good. This is the first time this has happened to me – and it certainly has been an experience.
On the way back to London this evening I took a picture of the view outside my aeroplane seat window:
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It’s not losing the phone that bothers me – it’s losing the SIM – its memory was packed full of 250 contact phone numbers of friends and associates – carefully built up and pruned over 10 years. It will be hard work to rebuild this – and I may actually lose some “friends” along the way. That’s frightening isn’t it? I had only just “cleansed” my phone book memory the other day – and hadn’t made a backup. And so I have learned a very important lesson the hard way: backup your phone book memory frequently!