At the Charlemont Community Resource Centre in Dublin two mothers were waiting at reception for their children to come out of gymnastics class. They were chatting about the nutritional value of a spice bag versus a stir fry. I stood there doing some admin on my laptop and offered my take on turkey burgers. Tastier when marinated, we all agreed.
It had been quite a day. The digital world is unavoidable but sometimes we are separated from it involuntarily, which is to say I had lost my phone again. I left it in a taxi the day before on the way home from Scrabble with Gerry. Another thing left in another taxi. I lose things. This is not news.
Anyway, I got home from Scrabble and looked in the bag and there the phone was, gone.
Yes, I did all the things: I logged into the cloud but the Find My Phone app held no clues because the device was out of battery when I left it in the taxi. I tried to log into the FreeNow taxi app in my email to find the phone number of the taxi driver, but I couldn’t get into my email because it needed two-step authentication where a special code is sent to your phone. The phone I didn’t have. The phone that also performed as a wallet, holding all my bank cards. My stomach churned with loss. I did not sleep well.
The next day, at 10am, I presented myself at the FreeNow office. It was full of taxi drivers who needed help with a lot of different problems. An extremely patient staff member found the number of the driver of my taxi. She called, waking Muhammad after a night shift, but he still kindly went outside to search his car. My phone wasn’t there. That was that. I asked the woman could I sit for a while in her office while drivers came in and out. I rang the bank to cancel my cards. I tried to get into my emails again. I drank FreeNow’s free coffee. And then I went home.
I was feeling stupidly sorry for myself. On WhatsApp messages, on my laptop, friends were consoling. “Grief about lost tech is legit,” Gerry pointed out. “Our phones symbolise our very selves. Go easy on yourself,” said Marian. A new phone would be ordered, the cloud would back it up, the bank cards would arrive in the post. It was just a phone. So why did I feel so wretched? Why was I feeling more anguished about this than, say, the cancer all over my body?
It made me nauseous. The loss of a screen was casting too big a shadow. It was pathetic. I’d wasted enough time on it. I decided to move on and let go.
I had moved on and let go when the message came through on the work Teams app. “Someone found your phone, it’s in the Charlemont Community Resource Centre.” When I got there a heavily pregnant young woman and her mother were standing by the door. I told them I was looking for my phone. Lianne said she’d spent the day searching for me on Facebook. (I don’t do Facebook.) Then her mother, Sonya, noticed the work ID in my phone case, and had the idea of emailing The Irish Times.
Later, I went to meet my daughters and a friend for dinner. Scrabbling around in my backpack, I realised my laptop was missing
It wasn’t Lianne who actually found the phone. She had been the passenger after me in Muhammad’s taxi and when they were leaving, her five-year-old daughter saw my phone on the back seat, thought it was her mam’s phone and passed it to her. Which is how Lianne came to hand the phone in to Martin at the Charlemont Community Resource Centre.
I asked for her daughter’s name. “Dream,” said Lianne and I laughed. Why Dream? Lianne had lost a baby so when her next daughter arrived, healthy, it was like a dream. I was quietly crying now. It had been a long day. “Dream,” I marvelled. “Although sometimes she’s a little nightmare,” Lianne said and we all laughed again.
Lianne’s other child is called Braxton. He’s a talented footballer with Crumlin United. The son she’s yet to meet, the one who’ll arrive in a week or so, has already been named Brighton. Lianne has this vision of them both, Brighton and Braxton, being top footballers in England. She’ll be a proud Soccer Mam. And in the middle of it all, a girl called Dream.
I waited around to meet her and she came bouncing out of gymnastics class, a little firecracker with a giant pink scrunchy in her hair. “I’m the one who found your phone,” she announced and I told her I was taking her to Tesco to buy any treat she wanted. “A packet of Chewits,” she said. So off we went to the shops.
Later, I went to meet my daughters and a friend for dinner. Scrabbling around in my backpack, I realised my laptop was missing. I rang Martin, who talked to Rob at the Community Centre. Yes, they confirmed, I’d left the laptop there. And I don’t know what to say about this except that it feels like I’ve spent my whole life losing and learning. I read something earlier in the Charlemont Community newsletter: “By recognising what’s been lost, we can choose what we reclaim,” someone had written in relation to our overuse of screens and the increase in tech-related stress. To recognise and reclaim. And maybe that’s the dream.
