Diablevert

The Most Retarded Mystery Ever

I have lost my phone. In the stupidest---or perhaps, if you are feeling kind to me, most mysterious---way possible. I've tried everything I can think of, and by the day after tomorrow I think I'll have to give it up and simply get a new one. (I can keep my number, I've checked.) But I like my phone and without the steep steep discounts of a new plan switchover, I probably won't be able to get that model. So I put the mystery before you, my scant score of readers, for help and advice.

The sequence of events is this: Early Saturday morning, I was preparing to leave the house to go to work. I was checking my email and glanced at my computer clock; I thought it was running a bit fast so I pulled my phone from my left front jeans pocket and checked it against that. This is the last time I remember having the phone. I saw that both clocks were in agreement which meant I should really get a move on if I didn't want to be late, so I left the computer, decided to change my sweatshirt for a different one, went to my room and did so, then went downstairs and gathered up my bag and jacket, and poured some coffee into my travel mug. I walked out the door of my house, noted that it was pissing down rain, and as I made my way down the street, dug my umbrella out from the depths of my bag and unfolded it. As I reached the end of my block I reached into my left front jeans pocket to get change for the bus. Finding it difficult to manage umbrella, coffee mug, and change groping at once, I stopped for a second and set down my coffee mug on a large knoll post at the end of somebody's driveway. When I reached back in my pocket I realized I didn't have my phone with me. Total time span: Ten minutes.

At the time, I checked all my pockets, figured I must have left it back at the house, and continued to work thinking little of the matter. Indeed, I was so certain that I must have left the phone at the house that I didn't even think of looking for it when I came back until I was about ready to go to bed.

Well, I looked every place I can remember being and no soap. The way I see it, there are two solutions, broadly:

1) A Clicker-in-the-Freezer Situation. During the course of some action so banal I have absolutely no conscious memory of it, I set the phone down, where it has possibly fallen into a crack, etc., as when you get up to get a drink while watching a movie and put ice cubes into it, leaving the clicker in the freezer, and then sit back down and don't realize it's missing until the movie's over, by which time you don't even remember having gotten a drink in the first place.

2) It fell out of my pocket at some point during the hundred-yard walk between my door and the end of the block where I noticed it was missing.

Working against 2 is that the last place I remember having the thing is my jeans pocket; pretty hard for it to fall out of that. On the other hand, I also tend to carry the phone in my left-hand coat pocket, particularly when I'm wearing the coat I was wearing that morning. If I thoughtlessly transferred the phone to my coat, my jerking around my shoulder bag and rooting in it to get my umbrella might conceivably have pulled my coat in such a way as to tilt the pocket so something could fall out. On yet a third hand, the possibility that really worries me is that I might, at the same time as setting my coffee cup down, have removed the phone from my pocket so as to better get at the change, kept in the same pocket. While I can totally see myself absentmindedly putting the phone down and leaving it there, this is countermanded by the fact that a) I noticed its absence at the time, and b) I remembered to grab the coffee cup, so it's hard to conceive how I could have put the phone next to it and not grabbed it at the same time. On another hand---note undrunk coffee---I was about half-asleep at the time.

Well, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews? (Possibly some of you may be Encyclopedia Browns, you iconoclasts, you.) Any thoughts? If I don't find it in the next couple days I'm gonna have to buy a new one; at the moment being un-contactable except by email is a pretty serious problem for me. And perhaps even a mild disappointment for you: No phone means no camera phone, and what will I post here if not colorful blurs? Anything that works for you in these situations? St. Jude has not been taking my calls. And I've tried just about everything else, even the Baker Street Irregulars.

Oh yes, indeed. See, since my block is really small and residential and suburban, I had a bit of hope that if I lost it along here somebody might have picked up and want to return it to me, as opposed to just nicking it. So I put up two signs, right around the spot where I think I may have dropped it, asking anyone who's found it to return it to me. And yesterday evening this produced not an actual phone but instead a passel of neighborhood children, who wished---having, they emphasized, nothing better to do---to have permission to look for my phone for me. So I said sure, explained to them the boundaries of their search area, and promised them ice cream if they delivered. And did they? No. Granted, I had earlier that day retraced my own steps looking for some sign of the thing and come up with bubkis, but really, what use is having a gang of loyal street urchins if they don't miraculously bring you necessary scraps? What kind of kids don't come through for ice cream? Little buggers.

So, they're no good. You must help me. Comment! Speak! I will welcome equally helpful advice or words of comfort, though knwoing my friends, what I will probably get (and deserve) are derisive wisecracks. Wiseacres! Yeah, you heard me.