A story of two phones
reflections on losing one
Last week I lost my phone. It fell out of my pocket as I cycled through the rain taking my kids to an appointment. When we arrived, I noticed it was gone and my son immediately suggested he turn round and retrace our route to see if he could spot it. He didn't. What followed was an insight into our relationship with the mini-computer in our pockets.
Once back home, I could remotely install a tracker app to get the gps location of my phone. Which while still in our town, wasn't on the route we'd taken. Or even that close. So we visited it. Knocking on doors to ask if they'd seen my phone as the gps tracker said it was there was a surreal situation to be in. We met some very nice people who were suitabley understanding and unhelpful. No one had seen it, or admitted to that. So it was gone.
I've lost some photos, we missed a rubbish collection as I missed the app notification, I need to remember what apps I added in the last few months, but other than that, it was far less of an event than I feared. Nothing was broken into, my insurance claim was approved within the day, I could block the sim/phone from home, and I could walk into the shop and get a replacement.
I still need a new case and sort out a few things, but it's almost the same as it used to be. Which makes me realise how much we now have in the cloud. If I lost my laptop, I'd have more of a problem, but most stuff is backed up and stored in the cloud, rather than on a specific device. We are all dependent on our devices more than ever, but it isn't the device itself which is the important thing. Any device can be switched for any other with very little impact. New log-ins and a bit of setting up and you're good to go. Even that can be improved with password managers and device back-ups and probably other things I'm no longer up to date enough to be aware of.
There's no emotional connection to the item itself. The phone you've had for the last year is replaceable and you won't miss it. A better camera, more data storage and whatever else new gismos it has and the old one you took with you everywhere is left on the shelf somewhere, forgotten. Life without a phone is almost impossible, but it isn't the item itself which is important, but the connections it forms to apps and data and whatever else.
I'm not sure this makes sense, or what I'm trying to say with all of this. I'm just left with a sense of loss, and confusion that it was all so easily sorted out. Which is partly luck and insurance and having things set up in a way to make it easy to transfer stuff across. Yet, for the huge role our phones play, I still feel that it should have been worse! Even though I'm so grateful it wasn't.Â