The Phone Swap

Day 1 of 21

Allie Lake’s diary (via CloudLink Drive // The Lake Dock *new*)

Oh my God.

I’ve just got home from the airport, and I’ve lost my phone.

Genuinely lost it.

I don’t mean that it might’ve fallen down the back of the sofa or something, either.

I mean that I’ve actually left it somewhere.

The plane, I think. The plane’s the only thing that makes logical sense.

Because, even worse, I’ve accidentally picked up someone else’s phone.

Can hardly bear to type that sentence because how on earth does that even happen?

I never lose things. Yet, here I sit: my phone, definitely lost, a stranger’s in my hand instead. An accidental swap on the flight . . . I think? Maybe?

Argh. I don’t know.

Can’t currently think in a straight line. Keep retracing my steps.

– Left work in Bermuda yesterday afternoon. Arrived at JFK. Boarded my flight to London.

– Phone died an hour into the flight. I had no charger pack. Lent it to another researcher who had hours until her flight home to Berlin and wanted to call her kids.

– Swapped seats with serious-faced man in a pink baseball cap and sunglasses who needed legroom. (Suspect number one?)

– Was happy with new location of window seat but then kept being woken by fidgeting man beside me who was constantly checking his phone and slotting it into the back of the seat. (Deduced eventually that he was waiting for a game to hatch a dragon, but suspect number two maybe?)

– Landed in UK and took a taxi home.

– Pulled out phone, momentarily forgetting deadness. Muscle memory. (Otherwise known as: moderate phone addiction I’m definitely in denial about.)

– Realised that while it was the same phone with similar black case, it had 67% battery and my PIN did not get me get past the wallpaper – which was a plate of tagliatelle.

My wallpaper is not tagliatelle. (It’s that meme of a photo of space, saying, ‘You are here, worried about your council tax bill.’)

– Proceeded to panic more than I’d intended on taxi’s back seat.

– Called airline on grumpy driver’s phone. Hung up when driver’s messages trilled and trilled in my ear and I felt adequately haunted by endless Simply Red hold music.

– Got home just now. Called airline from my sister’s phone and spoke with yawning customer services agent who filled out a lost property form and asked me to ‘pop the other phone back to the airport’ as if the airport is a little shop in the village and not fifty-plus miles/one grumpy driver away.

And now, am just sitting here. In my stuffy loft-bedroom. Wondering what to do next and driving myself a bit mad about how such a thing even happened.

Maybe I was really tired from the red-eye and simply picked up someone else’s phone by accident?

Dragon Man? Slipped it in my bag when preoccupied?

Easily done when the plane you’re on suddenly smells like fried fish without explanation, and you’re actively dreading landing and going back home to June House and your sister for six months.

She’s gone all-in, as Sian always does, on the whole turning-Mum’s-farmhouse-into-a-bed-and-breakfast thing.

I pulled up to find she’s painted the front door Pepto-Bismol pink (‘branding purposes’ although am very unclear as to what she’s branding it as).

It’s on a hotel booking app. There’s a (also berserk pink) website now, which is all a bit ‘out there’ for my liking.

Have even arrived home to a real, human guest – ‘Clive’, in room number three, downstairs.

Bricklayer. Owns a van with a stuffed Honey Monster hanging out the grille.

Recently thrown out by his wife. And rusty foghorns for sinuses, by the sound of him through the floorboards.

All pretty disorientating.

Just yesterday, I was in Bermuda. Peacock-blue sea and sunscreen, my only focus: checking one last time that all the new gull chicks were tagged and logged.

Now I’m back home in sleepy Stought writing my diary on my old tablet because I need to talk it all out.

Well. Type it all out, at least. I keep saying I’ll give up writing here, but it’s still too much of a comfort to stop.

Mum set up this shared drive for us a couple of years ago, so she could read this diary while I was working away.

Her way of keeping in touch with me while I was in Bermuda.

Me, elbow-deep in field research, her, propped up in bed, her usual rust-orange tea, just as excited as me with my findings and bird data.

Sometimes I imagine she’s still somehow reading this.

Would be nice if she was, if only for the fact she was the tech-savvy one in this family and would probably know exactly what to do.

(Hi, Mum. In case you are somehow, even though the idea is quite ridiculous.)

Regardless, this helps. Writing. Retracing.

Making a plan. Because I NEED to get my phone back.

That’s assuming I even can. And if I can’t, then what?

It feels like my whole thirty-one-year-long life is on that phone.

I’m confident my cloud will have a lot of it, but I can’t seem to get into it without the two-factor authentication code, which maddeningly goes to the phone itself, so I’m without all of it.

Banking. Photos. Research data the university will want ASAP.

Messages. Memories. Mum’s last voice notes are on there, days before she died.

Years-old farming games we’d play together.

Our scores, our messages, frozen in time.

My sister shook her head when I told her I hadn’t used an authenticator app, and hadn’t ‘fixed’ my Find My Phone.

(Cannot tell her I disabled it because she kept tracking me while trying to rope me into stressful DIY projects at the house, texting stuff like, ‘Your phone says you’re not at work, but at a jacket potato cafe? ’)

Iris has been far kinder. But she’s my friend. She has to be. I texted her from my sister’s phone, which I’m permitted to borrow while she gets herself ‘breakfast service ready’ (whatever that is).

‘Oh, Allie,’ Iris texted. ‘What a twenty-first-century hell. Losing a phone is like waking to find you have no pancreas or something!?’ She also says I should keep calling my phone because someone might have it and pick up and ‘most people are nice.’

Optimist. (‘Er, all realists are optimists to the cynic,’ she’d say.)

Anyway, I’ve called loads, but no answer. Straight to voicemail. Phone clearly still very dead.

And there’s no point texting, because even if it was switched on, unlike a phone call, without the PIN, a stranger couldn’t even view it, let alone respond.

There must be a way I can put a visible message on the screen, though.

I just need to find a way and fast, before Sian arrives to take her phone back, when I’ll be back to being stranded in analogue wilderness.

Which is far worse than real wilderness.

I’ve done real wilderness for work and, as much as I don’t like it, at least there, you get the technicolour sunrises and a large animal-to-human ratio which I find favourable.

You even get patchy satellite internet and group chats with colleagues on obscure collaborative apps like TeamSync.

Maybe I could use TeamSync now?

No unlocking needed for TeamSync. As far as I remember, anyway. Helps to not have to contend with PINs and facial recognition when you’re a muddy scientist, typing in all weathers, up a mountain.

Hmm. Could that really work?

I could message myself from my tablet, and if anyone ever switches my phone on, they’ll see it. Hopefully reply.

Not a minute too soon, either, because my sister just arrived to take her phone back, 100% ‘breakfast-service-ready’. Which is . . . just her in a chef’s hat.

Yes. Sian, in a tall, Ratatouille-style chef’s hat. To serve our single guest, who’s only here because his wife kicked him out for buying an OnlyFans model something from her Wish List. (A Just Eat voucher, for record-keeping purposes.)

‘I need to get a recipe from my Pinterest for croque madame,’ she even said, like we have a fussy French monarch sleeping downstairs and not a trucker with a penchant for cereal box mascots. ‘Clive in room three is stirring. I can hear him blowing his nose.’