Find My iPhone

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Martin Hash
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Find My iPhone

Post by Martin Hash » Fri Apr 08, 2016 7:48 am

Med School for Middle-agers is not straight forward. There's no way to get admitted into a regular Med School, competition is too tough & no matter how high my GPA was in 1980, that just ain't gonna cut it, so I did Basic Sciences in Newcastle, England, then preparation for Clinicals on Grenada, an independent island in the Caribbean near Venezuela, where the people are descendants of sugar plantation slaves, mostly dirt poor, and there was no industry other than the Med School. But it was a great experience and my wife, Gwynne, treated it like an extended vacation, which essentially it was for both of us because it didn't really make any difference to me, so we did everything the island had to offer: hiking, swimming, rum-tasting, dancing, parades, you-name-it. In fact, rather than living on campus, we lived in a resort. It was the best year of our lives.

I always say that my iPhone was the difference in being able to graduate from Med School: without it I just could not have kept up with the young people, not only the encyclopedia aspect of it but the calendar, alarm, notes, and most importantly, the comforting aspect of knowing I've got some help. Certainly nobody in Med School was too concerned whether a Middle-aged guy passed or not. In fact, I was the oldest graduating student anyone knew of, and I had to Google the whole world to find another one. Yeah, I caught the smart-phones wave at exactly the right time.

Just before we were going to leave Grenada to go to the States for hospital rotations, my iPhone disappeared. I check it constantly, and when I'm not looking, and because I travel a lot, I have a habit of patting my pockets to make sure I still have it & my wallet, so I can pinpoint its disappearance to my presence in a bar. My wallet is in a sealed pocket & my iPhone is not: get jostled in a local crowd, and, oops, sticky fingers secret it away. The plane wasn't going to wait for us, so anguish aside, we left my iPhone in the hands of the theif who stole it. At that time, I didn't have a passcode on the phone, so all my personal information & contacts were exposed. Very concerning.
Find My iPhone.JPG
Back at home in Washington State, after lameting about my iPhone, my son, Haven, told me to track it with an app. He said I could run a program on my Windows computer that would show me where my Apple iPhone was at.
“What?! How come I've never heard of that? What if the phone is off?”
“It only works if there's still battery, and a lot of people don't know how to turn off their phone.”
“Well, the battery lasts a couple days, let's give it go.”
So I Googled “find lost cell phone,” and a FindMyiPhone site appeared. It had a short tutorial, and seemed easy enough to use, so I entered my phone number & password, and a map appeared which quickly zoomed into an apartment complex on Grenada near where my phone had gone missing.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” I whispered to myself.
There were a list of options I could do with my iPhone remotely, like add a passcode, put a message on the screen, and make it honk. I did all three in that order. The message I wrote said, “Someone is coming by to pick up this phone, please have it ready.”
“Now what?” I asked Haven.
“Is there anyone on the island you could have go pick it up?”
“My friend, Maggie, is there for a day, she'd do it.”
“You're going to ask a female to go to some random apartment and demand your stolen iPhone back?”
“You've never met Maggie: she'd do it, no problem.”

So I sent Maggie a email laying out the scenario & asking her if she'd do it.
“Sure. No problem.”
I turned to Haven. “See, I told you there would be no problem.”
“She hasn't done it yet. What if something happens?”
“Nothing's going to happen.”
Lost iPhone.jpg
My iPhone showed up in the mail a few days later.
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