Earlier this year my friend S. moved from West Seattle to Ravenna. But apparently her iPhone wasn't too happy with the move because it tried to come back this morning after three days on the run.
On Monday morning she got to her office downtown and realized that her iPhone4 was missing. Thinking back, she realized that she had maybe heard something drop out of her bag as she was standing up to get off the bus. But she hadn't seen anything on the floor so she went on her way. In retrospect, she knew it must have been her phone.
Fortunately, just the previous night, she had set up Apple's free iCloud service. So she was able to go online and use the phone's GPS to find it. The little green dot on the map located it inside the bus at the SoDo terminal.
She immediately called King Co. Metro. And I jumped in my car and drove down there to see if I could recover the phone before the bus went out on another route. But we were told that, due to security reasons (which have no doubt been in place since the 1994 Keanu Reeves film SPEED), no one was allowed inside the bus yard. And lost phones are not something they have time to worry about. They said the bus drivers generally do a sweep of the bus and any lost property is put in a lockbox. The property is then transferred to lost and found at 201 S. King. They said she could call after 10:30 the following day to see if the iPhone was there.
In the meantime, iCloud's features allowed her to remotely lock the iPhone (so no one could access her e-mail, texts, Facebook, etc.), as well as display a message and contact info on the phone's screen to let any good samaritans know that the phone was lost and how they could reach the owner. Had she wanted to, she could have also remotely wiped the contents of the phone. But then the ability to track it would be gone. A few hours later, the phone disappeared from the GPS. It seemed someone had turned it off. We hoped it was a bus driver. iCloud could automatically send her an e-mail message the next time the phone pinged the network. Pretty cool in all, short of having the phone levitate out the bus window and fly home on its own.
The next morning, the lost and found office had no sign of the phone. But after a few gruff and not so nice people fielding the phones at King Co. Metro, she finally got a really helpful person who was able to give her the actual coach number of the bus and the new route it would be on this morning. I was sure the phone had been lost irretrievably or that someone had taken it for themselves. But S. had faith that her phone was still aboard that bus. She told me how she had been sitting on the bus over or next to what she had described as a "wedge" (a wheel chock I guessed). She posited that her iPhone had maybe fallen down between that chock and the wall of the bus.
So with the information she had, she ran around like a mad woman this morning, trying to find the bus. The nice woman at King Co. Metro told her that coach number corresponded to a bus that was on the 5 route this morning. So S. raced from block to block trying to find it. That was when she saw the right coach number. It was actually the 54 bus to West Seattle. She jumped on the bus and went right to the spot where she had been sitting on Monday. Someone else was seated there so she asked if she could just step in as she was looking for something she lost. Sure enough, there was the iPhone. It was covered with dust from that overlooked corner of the bus. And the battery had died, hence its disappearance from the GPS map.
Needless to say, S. was elated to have her iPhone back. I suspect the iPhone itself may have been a bit disappointed to have had its plans to come home to West Seattle thwarted. The last I heard, S. was having a celebratory mocha while the iPhone was powering up on juice.
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West Seattle Blog
West Seattle Blog
