Ooops!

Hmmm. The slight problem with my exhilarating ride last night? I failed to notice my shiny new phone falling out of my pocket. Or rather I did notice it – I heard the unmistakable (and to me quite familiar) sound of a piece of technology encased in plastic hitting the tarmac – but for some reason I thought ‘oh, my lights must have come off the bike’ and then when I had checked and found both lights still there, I just shrugged, reasoning I’d hit a plastic bottle or something and pedalled on. It was only this morning that I realised I’d no idea where my phone was that I put two and two together.

Regular readers of this blog will know phones and I have a difficult relationship. I bought my first ever mobile phone in 2003 and I kept it for 5 years by which time its casing was a bit cracked from being repeatedly dropped but it was otherwise still working. A friend then gave me an old one of hers, which I dropped in a puddle and had returned, although it was never quite the same since. Another phone got dropped in a car park, picked up by a gang of scrotes and used to make prank calls to people in my address book which was annoying, and then threatening calls to someone else which ended up with me in the police station explaining why I’d never bothered reporting it at the time. The only bright side of that little episode was that there wasn’t much credit on the phone (I always get pay as you go for obvious reasons) and they were having so much fun with it they actually topped it up so when I got the number cut off I ended up about five pounds better off. Shortly after that my sister lent me a supposedly indestructable Nokia in a little rubber suit which I managed to destroy in short order, and then I got a new phone which got either nicked or dropped in London in January.

For those of you wondering why after all that I’d buy a smart phone, however basic, my reasoning was that if it was something I was using regularly I’d be better about not losing it. And for five months that actually seemed to work. Once I’d got over the whole new interface thing, I was quite pleased with my phone and I was regularly using it to check emails, tweet on the go, take pictures and generally become one of those annoying people who spends all the time poking their phones. Which meant I tended to keep track of it and better still look after it. It was only when I came on holiday and – needing to unwind – decided to spend a bit less time tweeting and emailing and generally staring at a screen that I started forgetting where my phone was. Ah, the relief of not always having to keep in touch with the world 24 hours a day! Who cared if a few tweets escaped me? What did it matter if that email went unanswered for an hour or two? I could simply admire the view without photographing it and then sharing it on instagram. My phone? Oh, well it’s around somewhere.

Where it was, was in my pocket which was not zipped… and then not in my pocket but lying in a puddle overnight. This morning I did the familiar pedal back retracing my steps the night before to where I’d heard it fall, where I found it lying in three bits in the road. The phone bit seems reasonably okay. The back is a bit battered but can be forced back onto the phone with a bit of work. The battery, though, flew out and seems to have been run over several times from the look of it. I’ve no idea if it will work again. I’ve seen plenty of iPhones with cracked screens that seem to work fine but I’m not sure Samsung build their phones to the same spec. It might be back to the broken Nokia for me…

Meanwhile, handy hints for becomming less of a scatterbrain when it comes to my nice things gratefully welcomed. And suggestions for new phones, preferably with some sort of a homing feature built in…