Saturday II

Happy November to all. Next month is Christmas!

I wasn't all that productive today. A little recovery from Friday at Biaggi's. Coffee and then Hy Vee breakfast with my pal Roy. Then a 49 minute run that extended past four miles. (Need to build up that distance/stamina.) Football. (All my teams lost.) Enough study on the camera to get those two pics up. And a spin with Margret. Not all that bad of a day. But a Loser's Saturday Night on the blog. And The Bourne Identity. Starring the neo-conservative Matt Damon.

One interesting exercise this morning was the small matter of losing my phone. And finding it. It's a story worth telling.

I had been at the office after breakfast to check on any Friday afternoon activity (since I didn't get back to the office yesterday afternoon following a client meeting on the Illinois side.) When I left a half hour or so later to get on with my errands, I had to make two trips to the car, as I had client files in the backseat that I had forgotten to take inside when I first arrived.

On the first trip out, I had set my phone and keys on the roof of the car as I gathered the files to take back into the office. I had to re-grab the keys as I went inside because I needed to lock the door. Didn't re-grab the phone. (Big mistake.) Took the files inside, came out, locked the door, jumped in the car, fired it up, and took off West on Kimberly to go to the dry cleaners just a little ways up the street to pick up some shirts. 30-45 seconds later, pulling into the dry cleaners, I look for my phone to check messages. Oops!

Fortunately, all of this happened in such a short period of time that even the Alzheimer's hadn't had time to kick in, and I was able to exactly recall the sequence of my actions described in the preceding paragraphs. If the phone wasn't in the car, I knew that I had to have left it on the roof of the car as I left the office. So I paid for the shirts and doubled back to the office to fully retrace my steps.

As most of you know, Kimberly is a four lane divided highway, and I looked across the grassy median to the westbound lanes as I went East to the cut-through, did the u-turn, and re-entered the office parking lot. I didn't see the phone. At the office, I first went inside to see if I had left the phone by chance on a box by the door (as I do at times). Nothing. Then from an office phone, I did the old, call your own number, to see if I could hear it ring. Still no luck.

Plan C kicked in and I walked through the parking lot, to the street, scanning the pavement. Nothing in the parking lot. Then its out walking alongside Kimberly (with exceedingly low expectations), with traffic whizzing along with little interruption. If I had had a sign, "Will work for a Phone", I would have fit in perfectly with some of the vagrants who occasionally populate Kimberly.

Finally, about 25 yards West of our office park entrance, in the crack between the two lanes, I saw the phone. In one piece. I hustled over to it at a break in the traffic, and picked it up. Except for a missing battery housing, it was undamaged. Amazing. Didn't see the housing close by, so I assumed it was gone. Blown in the wind.

But the phone gods were even kinder, as on my next drive by to head home, I saw the housing a few yards further up the road, and I was able to make a final scavenger recovery of the mostly undamaged housing. To an unknowing observer, my phone now looks a little "used", but certainly not like a veteran of Kimberly Car Wars.

This one could have obviously had a much worse ending. One could posit that this result, given the premise that you're going to leave your phone on the top of the car as you take off on an errand on one of the busiest roads in town, is as good as it gets. It certainly couldn't be much better. Unless you didn't leave the darn thing out to lose it in the first place.

There is precedent in my life for this kind of event. I specifically remember leaving some glasses on the rear bumper of one of my pick-ups after ending a bike ride at the Eastern Avenue parking lot, maybe 15-18 years ago. I was able to back track and find the glasses, but not before they were partially crushed by traffic. And uninsured.

Coffee cups and sodas have suffered terminal events numerous times over the years.

Now, my pal Roy loses his phones (yes, phones), pretty regularly. Nothing exotic like leaving it on top of his car, but by more routine exercises like in the seat of an airplane, a golf cart at a far away course, or while sitting at some other venue on his many travels. In market speak, if you were to "short" Roy's possession term for any one of his mobile devices, it wouldn't be a bad long term investment.

I think I pretty well beat The Lost and Found Phone story to death. Sorry. But it may be a reference point for the next family member's faux pas or mis-placement. Look for a similar meandering in a Craig Wilson colume coming to you soon.

Have a great evening.

BCOT