Find My iPhone

If you Google Find My iPhone, you'll find miraculous stories about people finding their phones after using Apple's cloud-based Find My iPhone app. This article in the New York Times is a good example:

"At about 7 p.m. on Thursday, a cashier at Tuci Italia, at 1393 Avenue of the Americas, near West 57th Street, was taking a break near the entrance of the shop and watching videos on YouTube, Officer Garland said, noting she was wearing headphones.

"Then, a man came into the shop, pointed a gun at her, grabbed her iPhone and fled, she told the police.

"When Officer Garland and Sgt. Richard Coan arrived, they found the woman crying, but Mr. Garland reassured her. “I told her when I walked in, ‘I’m going to find your iPhone,’ ” he said."

He did find it . . . . and arrested the thief.

I lost my iPhone last month, but the circumstances won't likely be reported in the New York Times.

I was preparing for that weekend highlight, a trip to the local recycling center.  After several trips between the house and car, I had loaded up the glass, tin, plastic, paper and the worst part, the smelly household trash in black "force-flex" Glad bags.  Glad?  On the last trip out the door, iPhone in hand, I noticed one more stack of magazines on the TV room coffee table and gathered them up in both hands, and then threw them all in the plastic bin of magazines and junk mail in the back seat of the car.

It wasn't until about an hour later when I was in town with my wife shopping that I reached into my coat pocket and realized . . . no phone.  When we got home I tore through the house, dialing my cell number, hearing nothing.  Then it hit me.  I threw it out.

So we drove back to the dump, swallowed our pride, and went dumpster diving.  No luck.  I drove back home, uncertain if it was at the dump or somewhere else, and my mind was already thinking ahead to the hassle of getting a replacement phone (no insurance), and re-entering all the numbers (no back up).  I was pissed.

When we got back to the house, our youngest son, who was home from college for the holidays, asked, "Did you try the Find My iPhone app?"  No, I said, in fact I hadn't even heard of it.  I quickly uploaded the app to my iPad, entered my cell number, and in seconds there on the screen was a Google street map view of the recycling center with an icon near the dumpster.

So we waited until the dump closed, then drove back and jumped the fence.  After all, we had our reputations to protect.  My wife called our son back at the house and he sent the homing beacon to my iPhone.  I could barely hear it, it sounded a bit like the submarine sonar pings from that 60s show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but instead of fathoms my phone was under a few feet of magazines and junk mail.  Our son kept pinging, we kept digging, throwing magazines and old bills left and right.  The pings got louder.  At least we weren't in the household trash dumpster, I thought, and it wasn't raining.

Nearly an hour later . . . there it was.