The Vanishing Cellphone

On Sunday, my cell phone disappeared. Without a trace. I did not lose it. It was not stolen. It has to be in the house I work in (I work in a house with four women with mental retardation). But it's not there. It's gone.

I know I had it when I arrived at work. I had brought it to work clipped to the strap of my purse. Then I clipped it to the pocket of my jeans. Then I noticed it was missing. M, one of my coworkers, swears she saw it on my hip after I had taken a walk to the Dumpster with a client and five bags of trash. She is positive, because she had asked about my charger, because she needed to recharge her phone, but the charger for the house cell phone was the wrong type. My charger was also the wrong type. Anyway, she is positive she saw it when she asked about the charger, and that was after I had come back from the Dumpster.

I bought this phone less than a month ago. It cost me more than $300. I was not happy about it disappearing so soon. M asked me if I had it insured. She has her phone insured, so if she loses it, she has to pay only $50 for a replacement. I haven’t insured my phone. I never insure my phones. All the consumer advocates say this is a scam. I am starting to wonder if maybe insuring phones is actually a good thing (I put my last phone through the washing machine; fortunately, the phone still worked after it dried out – a testimonial to Nokia). Or is insurance a good thing, and extended warranties a bad thing? I'm losing it, can't think straight about what is right and what is wrong. I just want my $300 phone back.

I retraced my steps in the house. The staff room, kitchen, laundry room, living room. I walked back to the Dumpster. It was snowing, ever so gently (this is the day some parts of New England and New York got nearly two feet of snow; we got far less than a foot), and I could still see my footprints. I think the black case would have stood out against the snow, even if it was partially buried. I kicked snow around, just to be sure. I found nothing but a few stray leaves and some trash that had blown around by the wind. If a car had come and run over the phone, I would have, at the very least, seen the broken pieces.

Back at the house, I revisited all the rooms I was in. Nothing. M called my cell phone from the house phone. It rang on the house phone, indicating the phone was still on (my phone goes straight to voice mail if the phone is turned off), but I could hear no cell phone ring. Then, in the back of the house, by the bathrooms and bedrooms, I thought I heard the faint tones of the Charlie Brown theme, the ring tone I had recently downloaded. It gave me hope. But I could not be sure where it was coming from, as the clients were watching one of the Harry Potter movies in the living room, the one with the two-headed dog. M went and turned off the movie and told the ladies to be quiet. I heard no more when she tried calling my cell phone. I was sure I had heard the Charlie Brown theme, but maybe I was hearing the sound track to the movie. (Dang! That movie has gentle harp music. Is it possible that I heard that instead of gentle piano music?) The ladies all swore up and down that they hadn’t taken the phone (well, ok, one claimed she did it, but, since she cannot walk on her own, she was the least likely suspect).

M or J (I forget which) suggested the phone might have fallen into one of the garbage bags I closed up. Three bags had already been closed, but I closed the other two. So J stayed with the ladies while M and I walked back to the Dumpster. M kept calling my cell phone while we walked. It was windy, but I think I would have heard the phone. I’m sure I would have seen it peeking through the snow. At the Dumpster, still silence. We identified two of the bags as ours, but no phone. Someone else had come along and dumped bags of beer bottles into the Dumpster. We knew those weren’t ours (but they would have been a goldmine for someone looking for bottles to turn in for the deposit). I looked into one of the bags we had taken to the Dumpster. No phone, no ringing. It was cold and windy and snowy. We didn’t really want to go Dumpster diving too long. How deep would the bags have gone? We would have heard the ringing, if the phone was there, and still holding a charge, wouldn’t we?

I also checked in my car and, later, my apartment. On Monday morning, I tried calling my cell phone. This time, it went directly to voicemail, indicating the battery had finally run out. I called the cell phone company and suspended service, in case someone had found my phone and was using all my minutes for their own use. But I don’t think that’s the case.

This isn’t the first electronic item that has disappeared on me. When I was a supervisor, I had to carry a beeper every five or six weeks. While the beeper was in my custody, it disappeared, never to be seen again. Fortunately, the agency is smart enough to insure their items, so a new beeper was shipped within a week. Like my cell phone, there is no place the beeper could have gone. It just vanished.

This leads me to conclude a ghost took it. When I go back to work today (I have Mondays and Tuesdays off), I am going to demand that the errant spirit give me back my phone. Or maybe….the client who claimed responsibility has telekinetic ability? Worth looking into…..