The most interesting thing that happened to me today is that I lost my phone… for about twenty minutes, then I found it again. There is a little more to it than that.
Andie and I went out to Ikea earlier, because she had a £20 voucher that is expiring on Saturday, and we're away at the weekend, so we thought we might as well go and spend it. I wanted an additional storage box for Bits And Pieces, and we figured we'd almost certainly be able to make it up to the minimum required to use the voucher. We also took the opportunity to go and have a plate of meatballs and a cake, as is tradition when one goes to Ikea.
Anyway, on the way back we stopped at the petrol station to fill up the car ahead of our trip away at the weekend, and I realised that my phone wasn't in my pocket. Moreover, my watch wasn't connected to it via Bluetooth, so I couldn't hit the handy "Find My Phone" button to make it make a noise. Mild panic set in, but given that I was using the phone on the trip to Ikea and immediately after dinner, we figured there was only a finite number of places it could be. We went home to use the Web-based Find My Phone feature from Google to confirm it was where we thought it was — after a couple of failed attempts to connect, it did indeed appear where we thought it would be — and, from there, I was able to lock it and leave a message on its lock screen asking anyone who found it to call Andie's mobile.
Then, we got back in the car and drove back to Ikea. On the way, we got a phone call from my phone from a chap called "Logan" who had found my phone and was handing it in to the customer services desk. It had, as I suspected, fallen out of my pocket without me noticing when I got out of the car to pay for the parking ticket. After a quick bit of convincing a near-indecipherable woman on Ikea's customer service desk that I was, in fact, the owner of this phone, I was able to retrieve it and we were home again by 9pm. Hurrah.
Not exactly the way I wanted to spend my evening, no, but it does go to show that some things in tech do, in fact, still work the way they are supposed to in this desperately stupid age we live in. I was able to confirm my phone's location, lock it to prevent unauthorised access (including remotely signing it out of my Google account and removing my cards from the Wallet app), leave a message for anyone who found it and provide a number for people to call if they found it — and when I did recover it, I was able to quickly and easily sign back in without losing anything.
So much in tech is complete shit these days that I feel like we should celebrate these small little instances of Shit Doing What It's Supposed To Do when they do happen. So consider this my mark of appreciation for those few little bits of tech I had cause to use this evening — and which you hope you do not have cause to use frequently — that have not (yet) been completely enshittified.
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