How far would you go to retrieve a missing phone? As far as it takes, I learnt

It was a Saturday night and my partner was shaking me awake.

“What is it?” I asked blearily, struggling to open my eyes. He pointed to the bedroom door, and there was my daughter, home from her party.

“What time is it?” I mumbled.

“About one,” he said.

It is never good to be woken at 1am.

“Mum,” my daughter was saying. “Wake up! I’ve left my phone in the Uber!”

I was very deeply asleep, but the word “phone” sprung me into action. My kids have lost many things in their time (as, admittedly, have I). We’ve lost jackets, jumpers, jewellery, keys, purses, and even cars (though the cars tend to turn up, definitely NOT where I parked them).

But phones are different. My daughter is deeply attached to her phone. And, to be honest, the prospect of her being phoneless in the world – and me, potentially, not being able to contact her at will – made me deeply uneasy.

I called my daughter’s phone but it rang out. I called again. No answer.

“Can we call the Uber driver?” I asked her.

“My friend ordered the Uber.” she said.

“Can you call your friend?”

“I don’t know her number. It’s in my phone.”

I shook my head and muttered something about landlines, and Teledexes, and the downfall of humanity since our reliance on technology. And then I remembered that technology produced the Find My app, which could help locate my daughter’s phone.

“I see it,” I cried, staring at a moving blip on my screen. “It’s down the road! Let’s go!”

My daughter looked sceptical but followed me out the door. Bear in mind, I was still half asleep and did not have a plan. Worse, I was not wearing pants. But my daughter’s phone was moving away from us at an alarming rate, and I knew she would be desperate to have it back. So within seconds I was driving, in hot pursuit, wearing only a T-shirt and undies. There may have still been an earplug in one ear.

“What kind of car was the Uber?” I asked, as I veered through the dark streets.

“I can’t remember,” she said.

In my hazy state, it dawned on me that this might be a problem. We were following a signal, not an actual car. Even if we came close to the phone, we’d have no way of knowing which car it was in.

And even if my daughter did manage to identify the Uber, what was I supposed to do next? Open my window and yell? Honk my horn and gesture wildly with my hands? I was a middle-aged woman with crazy sleep hair and no bra. If the driver was smart, he would lock his doors and speed away.

Still, it was her phone. My daughter couldn’t live without a phone.

By 1:30am, I was bleary with exhaustion, the signal was now a kilometre away, and we had called my daughter’s phone 24 times with no success. “This is hopeless,” I said. I could see on the app that her phone was almost out of battery power. Soon the signal would disappear off my radar. “We’ll have to track it down tomorrow.”

“It’s OK,” my daughter said.

I had no idea how she could be so calm. By tomorrow, the phone could be lost to a random Uber passenger with skills in hacking and a penchant for luxury goods. She needed to go to work the next day. How on earth would she contact me without her phone?

By 1:30am, I was bleary with exhaustion, the signal was now a kilometre away, and we had called my daughter’s phone 24 times with no success.

KERRI SACKVILLE

Back in bed, I fretted. I wondered if my daughter was fretting, too. After 10 minutes, on impulse, I reached out to my phone on the nightstand and pressed my daughter’s number one last time. The phone rang once, twice …

“Hello?”

It was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard. “Oh my god!” I cried. “Hello!”

Someone had answered. On the 25th try. In the wee small hours of the morning, it felt as though I’d reached God.

It wasn’t God, but it was close. It was the Uber driver, whose name was Hamza. He was lovely, if a little overwhelmed by my exuberance, and only a few suburbs away. I offered to pay him to return the phone to us immediately.

“Whatever you want!” I said. “Name your price!”

I realised that sounded a little excessive, and glanced at my partner. He shrugged. “Whatever it takes to get back to sleep.”

We waited together outside in the darkness, and eventually Hamza pulled up in his car. “Sorry it took so long,” he said, as he handed over the phone. “It was on silent in the back seat.”

I thanked him profusely and paid him double the cost of the fare. It was still far cheaper than a new phone. And then I knocked on my daughter’s bedroom door, triumphantly holding out her phone, thrilled to put her out of her misery.

She was fast asleep, blissfully unfazed. Turns out the one most attached to her phone was me.

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