I believe that all of us have been though this minor heart attack that is not being able to find your phone suddenly while you are in public and this happened to me yesterday for about half an hour. It is not a nice feeling because even though I am not a heavy user as far as my phone is concerned, it does have basically my only access to a lot of things including my ability to do online banking as well as 2FA. I do have these things backed up but I think it is an understatement to say that reloading those things is a massive pain in the ass. I've had to go through it once in the past and I would say that it took me something like a full week to get everything properly loaded back up.
I think security is pretty good on most phone so that nobody outside of some seriously good hackers would ever be able to get the thing open without my fingerprints but to be safe, I have an option on my phone where it will "brick" the phone if I truly have lost it.
Yesterday was something that really stressed me out though and thankfully it has a happy ending.
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My situation was one where I was having dinner and drinks with some friends yesterday and like almost everyone else at the tables, I just parked my phone on a table rather than keep it in my pocket. This was an indoor place and Vietnam thankfully doesn't have a ton of phone theft that goes on here and I do not know why it is that way but I am glad that it is.
Everything was fine but since I am not one of those people that is constantly checking my phone because I think that is a dick move when you are around friends, I hadn't actually touched it for a half hour or so. When it came time for us to all leave people were getting up to pay and most of the people had already left by the time I realized that my phone was not around. I had a backpack with me and I emptied it out completely, put everything back, and then repeated that process at least 2 more times - I'm sure we have all been there at one point or another.
I asked the few people that were there to please check their pockets or handbags if they had them and everyone did and nobody had it. I also asked my friend to call my phone in case it had been put behind the counter by the staff or something like that. This resulted in the phone just ringing and ringing and ringing which is actually a good sign because when people steal phones one of the first things they do is switch it off. I also had a friend put out a group message asking if anyone noticed my phone or accidentally walked off with it. As silly as it sounds people often walk off with someone else's phone because almost all phones look quite similar. This is especially true with mine because I have no customized it in any way because I am not a teenager.
So I had just about resigned myself to it being gone and was about to take the next step which would be to ask the staff to review the CCTV footage. I don't know if it is a law or something like that but basically everywhere has CCTV, even small businesses like the smokehouse that we were eating at. I was about to ask them to check it, which I know is a huge pain in the ass for the establishment, when someone found it in their pocket.
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While it was a wonderful thing to have my phone back I was kind of upset at the person that found it because she was one of the only people that I directly asked about it and even asked her to check her pockets. She IS one of those people that is always extremely wrapped up in her phone even in public so she previously answered that she didn't have it right in front of me about 10 minutes prior. I know for certain that she wasn't trying to steal it but it is upsetting to me that someone would be so aloof and into whatever Angry Birds sort of BS she was doing on her phone that she couldn't be bothered to at least check to see if she had picked up the wrong phone. This is just extremely inconsiderate. Also, how the hell did she not notice that her pant leg was vibrating 30 times in a row when my other friend called it?
One good thing came out of this though: That minor heart-attack that I had when I thought the phone was gone has inspired me to be a lot more careful about where I leave my phone and even though Vietnam is a really safe country as far as petty-theft is concerned, it can happen and what if a stranger had honestly just picked up the wrong phone and once they realize it, perhaps they don't even remember where they picked it up? I suppose in that situation the only recourse I would have would be to hope that they would pick up a call if I I did call it later... this has happened to me in the past where I was dumb enough to leave my phone on the sand at a beach one time long ago.
So let this be a reminder to everyone else out there that almost all of us have a lot of our lives in our phones and it would be quite devastating if it were all of a sudden legit go missing. I have backed up my phone once again and honestly, this is something that I should do weekly if not more frequently than that. I am not going to do a cloud service though, because I refuse to pay for such nonsense.
If this has ever happened to some of you out there I would be interested in hearing your story as well