Last month I lost my cell phone on the IKEA shuttle bus. I was not drunk; I did not drop it in a toilet; I was on my way home to put together my new filing cabinet and go to bed at 11PM.
I didn’t realize it was missing until the next morning and I had a heck of a time contacting the outside world again. My roommate was away for the weekend and we don’t have a landline, so I turned to my laptop. I e-mailed my brother, who has a BlackBerry, and asked him to call our house and ask my mom to sign in to AIM. He was in class (on a Saturday?), and since my parents don’t [know how to] text, he had to wait a couple of hours before calling. When he got in touch with them, it took approximately seventeen minutes for my mother to boot up the computasaurus.
With my mom on AIM and my brother on Gchat, my dad got on the phone to AT&T to switch my number over to their family plan. Thank goodness my Verizon contract was up the previous weekend. Perfect timing, Bad Karma.
Meanwhile, my pink Razr was out there in the big bad world. According to my account status on the Verizon website, no calls had been made since the last call I received myself on Friday, and so I wondered where it could be. But while I crossed my fingers that my phone was down a storm drain along 9th street, someone racked up $515.51 in text messages, calling card charges, long-distance calls to the Dominican Republic, and Lil Wayne ringtones. Oh, and a picture message to someone on Match.com.
Let this be a lesson to all of you: if you have any reason to think that your cell phone could be in untrustworthy hands, please log in to your service provider’s website and suspend your service temporarily. Even if you have a feeling it might be on your desk at work or in your boyfriend’s car, an inkling of doubt is reason enough to hold the phone.
The Verizon website makes it simple; there is no charge and you don’t have to sign a new contract or order a new phone right that second, so if your phone does turn up, you can reactivate the service. I have fewer nice things to say about the accuracy of the account usage details reported on the site, but I should have known better than to depend on those. To put off suspending my service and hope for the best was lazy and against my better judgment.
It took two cumulative hours on the phone with Verizon, but they shrank that bill down to $121 something. And it took too weeks, but I finally got my new phone (goodbye pink Motorola, hello dark purple LG!) and activated it and I’m starting to add phone numbers in one by one. There will be no Facebook events or groups in honor of my foolish misfortune and someone else’s malevolent fortune! Nor will there be any Lil Wayne ringtones. I will consider Sara Bareilles, however.
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