(This will reflect poorly on me...)
In Colombia phones like mine are known as flechas (arrows) because "cada Indio tiene uno" (every Indian’s got one). (That might be racist.) My phone is the cheapest you can find, but it is trustier than a Swiss Army knife. Transitioning from my emailing/scrabble-playing/mind-reading smart phone was hard at first, but I have grown to love my little flecha. Although recently I’ve been a little careless with her...
INSTANCE #1: The Nameless Hero
Shoot, I’m going to be late, I realized when my watch alarm went off and I was still in my house. I reached into my jacket pocket to send a text apologizing for my delay and my fingers grasped at empty fabric. My other hand instinctively went through the routine patting sequence: jeans pockets, back pockets, backpack side pocket. No dice. My eyes were simultaneously executing Operation Cross-Check darting from the dining table, to the desk, to the pile of laundry on the floor. Nada. My brain was replaying the previous two hours in reverse, scanning the mental recordings for clues as to the last known location of my phone. To no avail.
So I asked my roommate to call my phone to see if I could hear it ring somewhere and to my surprise, someone answered. It was a boy, or a man, or an adolescent-ish male. It was pouring down rain outside but I told him I would bike to the gas station near where he was to recover the phone. On the way I bought a giant chocolate bar and some other candies and prepared myself to even flirt a little with the kid for being the savior of my social and professional communication life.
I waited on the corner, getting drenched by passing buses until he appeared, phantom like, on his bike. I hardly let him get a word out before I started gushing my thanks and appreciation. He shyly accepted my gifts and then pedaled away, disappearing silently into the rain.
INSTANCE #2
I don’t particularly like malls, but I needed some alone time outside the house and it was 9:30pm on a Sunday so everything else was closed. Other than the fluorescent lighting and echoey music, the lounge couches set up outside the stores are comfortable enough, if for nothing else than their anonymity. The mall-ies are so entranced by the lights and colors gleaming from the store fronts that my sofa island in the middle of the wide hallway is like a room of two-way mirrors, me looking out and everyone else seeing right through me.
I had been ensconced in my invisibility bubble for almost an hour before a middle aged man strode right up to me and popped it.
“Excuse me,” he said with a strange grin, “Are you American?”
Really?, I thought. Here I am, minding my own business on a mall couch at 10:30 at night and this guy is going to come ask me to give his daughter English classes.
“Yes,” I said, smiling in a plastic way that I hoped was conveying polite noninterest in this conversation.
“Do you speak English?”
I knew it. “Yes...”
“Do you have a cell phone?”
This guy meant business. “Yes...”
“Did you use the bathroom on the second floor a while ago?”
Now I was confused, and slightly creeped out. How long had this guy been stalking me just to ask me about speaking English? “Um, yes... Why?”
“What is your phone like?”
All of the sudden a light bulb went off in my head. I saw the flashback of me setting my phone on the back table of the bathroom stall. I suddenly became much more friendly with the man, who--although dressed in normal clothes--had a curly chord coming from an earpiece that I hadn’t noticed earlier.
“Oh, yes! It’s small and black and really cheap looking. Did you find it?”
He explained to me that a woman had found it in the restroom and turned it in. He noticed it was all in english so he reviewed the security cameras looking for a gringa (apparently I was the only blonde person in the mall that night) and he tracked me down.
After signing a few forms and chatting--recounting the events leading up to our encounter, talking about Colombia, etc--he gave me the phone and I said if he or anyone in his family ever needed English classes that he had my number.
INSTANCE #3: El Sequestro
I dialed my number and listened hopefully for a vibration sound to buzz from a hidden corner somewhere in my room. The ringing tone sounded flatly in the speaker, but the room was silent. I felt a drop of dread. Then suddenly,
“Hello?”
“Hello, hi!” I stammered, caught of guard. “Um, I think you have my phone.” Stating the obvious.
I was immediately relieved that the voice was an older woman, surely a mother. I imagined her in a pair of clunky Latin grandma heels walking with quick short strides down 13th street where I had been riding my bike that morning. I imagined her taking a second glance at what could have been a black rock on the sidewalk and then bending over to see that it was actually the phone that had slipped from my back pocket without my noticing. I imagined her fretting over the pour soul that had lost it and pondering all morning of ways to find the owner.
I asked her where I could meet her to take it off her hands, feeling so lucky and grateful I was already thinking about inviting her to lunch. She sounded a bit confused about what the next step should be, but then out of the blue she asked, “But how do you plan on thanking me for my honesty?”
“Excuse me?”
“I am a very honest person.”
“Oh.” I didn’t feel like taking her out to lunch any more. “You mean money?”
The image of the concerned grandmother in my mind's eye evolved into a Disney villain with a crooked nose and a wart.
I offered $10.000 pesos which offended her. She suggested that I take the next hour to reflect and consider what my phone really meant to me. Click.
The Disney villain image evolved into a Matriarch Mafiosa smoking a cigar in a dark room, empty except for the leather chair she was sitting in, a table with an old rusty phone, and my cellphone--tied up, gagged, black eyed and bloody nosed.
Sixty minutes later I called her back, with the desire to plead for her to set off the ring tone of my phone so I could hear it, so that I knew it was alive and OK.
“$15.000.”
“$20.000.”
“Fine.”
We arranged to meet on a public corner in twenty minutes. No police. I arrived first, scanning every 50+ female that walked by until finally I saw her--hair perm, nice purse, designer sweater. You can’t judge a book by its cover but this lady certainly didn’t look like she was in desperate need of $20.000 pesos. She came accompanied by her crony, another elderly woman, tall and thin with short grey hair and a dignified steel glare that said, “What we are doing is perfectly fair and noble.”
“Do you have my phone?”
“Do you have the money?”
“Show me the phone.”
“You might run away with it.”
And that would be within my right, I wanted to say. But finally they Crony backed up a few steps, reached into her deep bag and gave me a peek of the ransom victim.
Then they had the audacity to whip out a handwritten contract promising not to go the cops. It didn’t mention anything about the black mail fee. I took the paper and wrote, “This is bullshit and extortion” (in English) on the bottom and put my big official John Hancock underneath.
We made the exchange. Before we parted ways I said, “I just hope that if the same thing happens to you someone does you the same favor.”
But, to be honest, the person who needs to learn the lesson is obviously me. But I think the third time’s the charm.
