Let me set the scene. This Wednesday, I went to the Jose Gonzalez show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and on our way back, I lost my cell phone on the E line of the Green Train.So like any good investigation, I have been following up on multiple leads. I called the MFA, the MBTA, the Boston police, etc. No lost, cute little flip out cell phone. I put up a lost ad on Craig’s List, etc. Despite my refresh every few minutes between working, nothing. I’ve also been monitoring my minute usage at T-Mobile to see if someone has been using my phone hopefully so I can call whatever numbers this person calls and try to figure it out that way. This morning, I finally started feeling resigned to losing my phone and more importantly, all my phone numbers. I looked on craigslist for a good replacement. I decided to splurge for shits. Maybe if I spend a lot of money on a phone, I won’t lose it as easily. And then, I SAW THIS AD:

That is my phone!!! Someone is trying to sell my phone on craigslist!! Listed two days after it was lost! So this would be called “jumping to conclusions” in any normal investigation. But let’s look at this ad. This person is selling this phone today only. S/he “gotta sell this tonight”? Why is that necessary? And most tellingly, “this is a steal”, Freudian slip? Okay so, to be fair, if it wasn’t pick pocketed, I lost it fair and square. And no one has any obligation to try to find its owner. I called Boston police to figure out if I even had any options considering my suspicions. Don’t they have enough time to set up a sting operation? The answer is no. I’d have to file a police report. Lame.

Instead, I’m setting up my own sting operation. I emailed the person, trying to gather further information about the phone so as to not jump to conclusions. I asked “do you have a charger and are there any scratches on the phone?” Both legitimate questions in order to discover if this is a good buy and to see if it is stolen. I even created another email address (warnergeroge@yahoo.com) to just ask if I could buy the phone. The craiglist person said s/he is going to be around until 5. Time is ticking down and he hasn’t responded to either emails.

Now that I’m just waiting for his email and after having gone through all of this, why do I even care so much? As I was telling one of the other interns about the situation, one of my coworkers began a diatribe against contemporary culture and the materialism of our age. Honestly, I just miss my phone numbers. I will never sink low enough to create a facebook group begging for numbers, but there’s a reason why people do that. Not only does having such a database of numbers come in handy and become annoying to replace, it just makes me feel like I’ve lost some connection, however minimal, to some people that I do like to infrequently catch up with and probably will forget to email or ask another way for their number.

Maya, an Amherst intern who was with me at the Jose Gonzalez show, asked me how I remained so calm when I knew I lost my phone (even as I’m freaking out now). It has to do with the real world vs. Amherst. At Amherst I’ve lost my cell phone in various places all over the campus – the library, the campus center, dorms, etc. I think I can count at least 5 times when I didn’t have my cell phone and I had to hunt it down. Every single time, some gentle Amherst soul turned it in to the right place. Boston, a true representation of the real world, is not so gentle or forgiving.