Faith in humanity and
technology restored

Last week my wife lost her cellphone not once, but twice within a span of 3 days and both times it was thankfully recovered because of the kindness of strangers.

The first time she lost it was at a taxi in Davao City. Her cellphone, an almost 4-year-old iPhone 4S that qualifies as ancient in a world where people inexplicably trip over themselves to get the latest and greatest as far as consumer electronics are concerned, slipped out of bag in the cab as she was on her way to work in the morning.

She discovered that her cellphone was missing around 30 minutes after being dropped off and after the initial shock, asked her office mate to call it in a bid to find it. To her surprise, the taxi driver, a guy named Leandro Miro, answered the phone and told them that he was already at the lobby of their office where he had gone back to return the phone. It turns out the passenger that boarded the taxi after her saw the phone on the seat and turned it over to the cab driver who figured out that it must've belonged to the previous passenger so took the initiative to go all the way back there to give it back. The taxi driver who was obviously both honest and considerate, didn't even have to be prompted or asked to return it as he was already within the premises of their office building by the time my wife had noticed her phone missing and had asked her friend to call it in a bid to locate it.

Friends say my wife was lucky to have lost her phone in the Davao that Rudy Duterte's iron fist had transformed into one of the safest cities in the world. Too bad the guy didn't run for President or he would have given me a really tough time weighing his achievements over his spotty human rights record.

Then my wife, who takes pride in never having lost a cellphone before, lost it again 3 days after, this time in Talisay City.

We had just gotten home from the Ayala Northpoint District when she realized that her phone was missing. We searched her bag and the car frantically and after a few minutes of searching we came to the harrowing conclusion that the phone was back at the dining area of the mall's food fair.

We immediately headed back to the mall. By the time we got back there around 20-30 minutes must've passed. She searched the area where she last remembered holding her phone but it wasn't there anymore. I started using the “Find My Friends” app on my phone to try to locate her phone and after a few unsuccessful attempts, a connection was made and it was found to be within our immediate area.

Since I didn't really trust the ability of the app to accurately locate another phone, I wandered around hoping to spot her phone in the crowd, and then strayed back to the parking lot, hoping that it was either still in the car or had been dropped in the parking lot. I was alternately calling the phone that was thankfully still ringing and checking its location but as soon as the map showing her phone's location indicated that the distance between the missing phone and me was increasing, I moved back towards the area of the mall where the app initially indicated we were practically on top of her missing phone.

When I got back there, I saw my wife talking to some Metro Gaisano employees who were gathering shopping carts. She was hoping the phone had been left behind in a grocery cart and she was asking them. By this time the app indicated her phone had moved from the mall to the waiting sheds across the highway. Seeing a waiting jeepney at the approximate location of where her phone would be, we crossed the highway and then pleaded with the passengers of the jeepney to check if they had picked up her phone. The driver patiently waited as we talked to his passengers and as the passengers checked their bags to humor us, her phone had stopped ringing and I was starting to lose hope.

Having no evidence other than a dot on a map of my smartphone, we had to let the jeepney go and at that point I was pretty convinced that we were never going to see her phone again. We crossed back to the mall and shared our findings with the guards and the grocery employees who had been watching us ever since we asked for their assistance.

I was showing them how we had located the phone using the app when it popped up again at its last location that was across the highway. The jeepney had gone but it had miraculously stayed behind! What's even better was that it was ringing once more. The 2 guards, named Magalona and Beniten, along with the 2 grocery employees named Nicol Sadje and Bernie Badiles, accompanied us across the highway one more time and helped us search the waiting shed area.

After a couple of minutes one of them found the missing phone. It had been left in a styro box behind the waiting sheds. My guess is that whoever took it got spooked when he/she saw us talking to the guards, it started ringing, and we were somehow being drawn towards the missing phone. Whoever took it must've panicked when they saw us crossing the highway and then ditched it to avoid trouble.

We were lucky that technology worked in our favor, that the easily spooked amateur who found her phone panicked, and that the 4 good Samaritans from the Ayala District and Metro Gaisano helped us recover an item that should have been lost forever.

In the first case the goodness of human nature shone through. In the second case technology really helped but we wouldn't have found the lost phone without the help of kind strangers.

Faith in humanity (and technology) restored.*

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