On Monday night, I was taking the Amtrak train home from a NOVA shoot in Philadelphia - exhausted, but happy to have power and Wi-Fi for my laptop.
As the train was about to pull into Bridgeport, Conn., my stop, I checked my pockets - and my iPhone was gone. I was baffled; I hadn't even stirred from my seat except to get something from the café car, and I was sure to take my phone with me for that mission. Maybe I was pickpocketed. Maybe I'd set it down to pay for the food. I don't know.
But now my phone was missing. The Amtrak conductor held the train for about two minutes and helped me search around my seat - nowhere. She dialed it from her own phone, too - no ringing sound, and nobody answered. As the train pulled away, I used the Apple app, Find My iPhone, on my laptop to see where the phone was. It said that the phone was “offline.†In other words, somebody had my phone - it wasn't lying under a seat somewhere - and had turn ed it off.
Anyway, I spent three days going through the five stages of phone loss - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and kicking myself. Then, suddenly Thursday, Find My iPhone sent me an e-mail, saying that the phone was back online and had been located. It was in Seat Pleasant, Md., which my Twitter followers informed me is a rough neighborhood. The app created a map so I could see the house where my phone was supposedly sitting.
Now what? I contacted the Prince George's County police department. And I posted the map of the house to my 1.4 million Twitter followers, who have never let me down.
To my astonishment, the “find Pogue's phone†quest went instantly viral. Gizmodo.com investigated the area and posted street photos of the house. Local twitterites contacted the Prince George's County police department themselves. All manner of Web sites picked up the quest. “The @Pogue Stolen iPhone Saga is the future of entertainment. Day off is being s pent glued to @Gizmodo reading updates,†tweeted one person.
Every now and then the phone would seem to move - from the driveway into the house, for example. Had somebody come home and rescued it from a parked car? Or was this just the general imprecision of GPS, giving me a different reading?
By the end of the day, local police were actually at the house, with me on the phone. Find My iPhone has a great feature: From the iCloud.com Web site, you can make the phone ping, very loudly, for two minutes, even if its ringer is switched off. Over and over and over, I pinged the phone, so that the officer might hear it as he toured the house. My heart was in my throat; it was a cat-and-mouse game of GPS versus Bad Guy. I just kept hitting Refesh on the Find My iPhone screen, over and over again, in case the phone moved again.
Over an hour he spent searching. The backyard. The next-door house. The driveway. He never heard it, and he never found the phone. Near th e end of his search, the phone went offline again. Either its battery died, orsomebody got smart and shut it down so I couldn't track it anymore.
I'm not worried about the data. The phone is password protected, and of course the app lets me remotely wipe it clean of any data at any time. I'm just bummed to lose a very expensive phone.
I've sent a Find My iPhone message to the screen, displaying my temporary phone number and offering a reward. I'll monitor my phone records, in case the thief or whoever buys it makes a call. And I'll watch my Photo Stream, in case someone takes a photo. Maybe I'll get lucky.
In the meantime, I'll never know why such a diligent search, with the phone pinging away in the house where Find My iPhone said it was, never unearthed it. Just one life's great tech mysteries, I guess.
But I'm incredibly grateful to Gizmodo, the Prince George's County police, and my Twitter followers for joining me on the quest! If there's any more news, I'll be sure to let you know.
