Going into the weekend the Mallorys were looking forward to relaxing and doing “family things” like going to the park and shopping for home stuff. Saturday morning we got up, had coffee and breakfast and fed Jacob. The sun was out for a break between rain storms and it seemed our plan was going to work! We got the family loaded into the car around 9:30am when Jennifer asked if I could grab the diaper bag because her phone is in it. I grabbed the bag and she rummaged through for a while before declaring the phone must be somewhere in the car and we’ll find it later. We had a great walk around downtown Sacramento and by 11am Jacob was ready for a long nap. We headed home, still unsure where her phone was.
Once we got home we emptied the car looking for this phone… it was missing, but at this point we don’t think it’s lost or stolen. We sit down for lunch a little after 12pm when all of the sudden my phone rings, but it only rings once and then stops. I pick it up and I see a missed call from Jennifer’s phone! My heart drops.
Rewind a few weeks ago when Jennifer was between iPhone cases (the first one was ruined) she dropped the phone on the concrete, splitting the case and breaking some of the buttons on the outside. I went to the Apple store and let them know what happened… “oh and by the way, the home button never worked since day one.” They creatively warrantied the phone due to the home button issue and I walked away with a brand new phone for her. Unfortunately when we restored all of her information to the new phone we missed an important step: setting a security password.
Back to present day, we now realize whoever has the phone has access to her contacts, e-mail, Facebook, texts, almost anything. I send three text messages to her phone giving my phone number and asking whoever has it to contact me. I never got a response and eventually the phone started going straight to voicemail. Jennifer quickly changes all her passwords to her accounts and we call AT&T to report the phone lost/stolen. I’m just sick to my stomach knowing our personal information is floating around out there and we are going to have to fork over another $400 if we want to replace it.
Then the unthinkable happens, our doorbell rings. At this point it’s close to 1:30pm, four hours after the phone first went missing. I open the door to see our neighbor that lives across the cul-de-sac. To call these neighbors anti-social would be an understatement. It is a husband and wife in their upper-30′s who go out of their way to avoid human contact. The wife was at our door and I see the husband mulling around their driveway. She asks me “did you lose something?” while holding up Jennifer’s phone, which was scraped and battered. I was too shocked to think on my feet so I just thanked her for returning it and let her know how stressed we were that it was missing. She went on her way when Jennifer and I started putting things together in our head. Here’s how it played out in our recreation:
- Jennifer put the phone on top of the car while putting Jacob in his car seat
- The phone fell off the car onto the asphalt in the middle of the cul-de-sac when we left
- The neighbor found the phone in the next hour and a half while we were gone
- The phone has a picture of us right when you try to unlock it so it’s obvious who the phone belongs to, not to mention the complete photo album on the phone, which I’m sure he looked at
- All of the text messages I sent were read so he saw my requests to call me
- The text application opened up to a text from a friend, so not only did he read my texts, he was trolling around in her other texts
So to sum it up, our shady neighbor mulled around in our phone for four hours before giving it back to us (interestingly after we disabled service through AT&T) and then had the balls to walk over and give it back. I really don’t understand what they were thinking at all. I called a buddy to see if I should go over and give the guy a piece of my mind, but in the end it would only create an enemy and I wouldn’t get anything out of the confrontation. They did return the phone, but what kind of a neighbor rummages through another neighbors personal information for hours?
Testing FB login.. it works!
Matt, I was actually searching the web for reasons to use picasa for our family albums and came across this post. My wife and I both have iPhones (absolutely love em) and this is one of the worries we both had. What would happen if one of us lost a phone. I store a ton of personal info including work contacts (they would be pissed if someone got that) that I would hate to get into the wrong hands.
So our insurance policy was to get MobileMe. Not only does it work awesome with syncing contacts and calendars (she still tells me..”Did you check your calnedar?”) but it has pretty cool features I just can’t fathom not having (at least not since it came live).
The find my phone features worked great with locating a misplaced phone in the house. Played a tone and we were able to track it down behind our kid’s bed. Yeah, that was mine.
The remote lock feature is pretty good. Remotely locking the phone to prevent someone from (slow them down anyway) getting access to the info. And of course if all else fails… WIPE. remotely wiping the phone is an awesome feature to protect your stuff. (pretty sure it has to be on though).
Anyway, just thought I’d share and say…glad you guys found it. Oh yeah, I’m probably gonna go with picasa instead of flickr – only cuz I use wordpress and there isn’t a good plugin to support mobileme photos as an album such as the one you are using.
Take care,
Vince