the return of my long lost phone

Everyone keeps asking so I’m just posting the story now. :)

As most of you know, I lost my phone a couple months ago. (I just checked and it was mid-December so yea, about two months.) It was extremely weird because there weren’t many places it could have been and in the end, I thought someone had just stolen it. The only places I thought it could be were in my room somewhere, in my friend Grace’s car or at the gym. The gym turned out to be a no-go, I searched my room but there are ALWAYS random places in there that something could turn up, and Grace and I both searched her car at different occasions with no results. I was seriously looking through it for a good 15-20 min, moving the seats, looking under everything. But in the end, I thought it was lost. In the meantime my friend Chris Bishop gave me his old phone and I’ve been using that and looking into my options of getting a new one.

Again, this was all months ago. I thought my phone was long gone. Saturday night, however, I get a phone call from my dad. He asks, “Guess who I just got a call from?” “Who?” “Someone who found your phone.” “Really, are you serious? Where was it?”

Turns out my dad got a phone call from the Orem Walmart Auto Center. They told him that someone in a white Honda had found it in their car and turned it in. I was out of town, but my phone would be waiting there until I returned to retrieve it.

I was a little confused. How did my phone end up in some random car? Or why did it get returned to the Orem Walmart? My thoughts ranged from the person who stole it suddenly felt bad about it two months later and dropped it off at the first thought, that someone who worked there was somehow involved, that I had left it there during a Walmart trip and that somehow one of the workers picked it up and accidentally dropped it in the car. All options seemed unlikely.

Especially considering I never took my car to the Orem Walmart and most of my Walmart trips are usually at the Lindon Walmart. And why did they mention the white Honda? It seems kinda weird and, well, the only white Honda I know is that of my roommate Grace. Seemed a little odd.

Regardless of the situation, I was excited to finally get my phone back. Yay! I’ve realized how much I really liked my phone and was actually really sad about having to get a new one because I couldn’t find anything I liked as much. So I started to share the old tale of the reappearance of my long lost phone.

I returned from my East coast trip and was chatting with Grace that evening. I told her the crazy story, receiving the expected “That’s so weird.” “How did your phone get there?” etc, etc. There’s a moment of silence and then Grace asks, “Wait, when did this all happen.” I respond, “They called Saturday evening.”

At this point I’m not exactly sure what happened thoughtwise, but at some point Grace put together the pieces that SHE drives a white Honda, SHE was at that auto center Saturday, and SHE had found a phone in her car that she turned in.

My favorite comment was when I shared the story with Susie: “I’m glad you live with Grace. She is really funny.”

Turns out that the phone was, in fact, in Grace’s car the entire time and neither she nor I had managed to find it. The auto people, when vacuuming out her car, must have found it and placed it in a visible location. Grace, unsure where the phone came from, returned it to the center where the employee said that the guy working on her car had probably dropped it. She leaves, the employees realize it doesn’t belong to them, they somehow get enough power in it to find my dad’s phone number, and they call to report the found phone.

So today, I will venture over to that Walmart location and joyfully be reunited with my dear phone that I have oh so missed. I’ll see if I learn any more about this very interesting story.