We found the iPod thief, 3000 km away
It all started when my wife couldn’t be home for the holidays. She was stuck on a project in UAE. So she suggested we join her there for the holiday as there’s lot of touristy things to do, including a spectacular fireworks display on New Year’s Eve at Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. However I got held up, so our 13 year old flew alone as an unaccompanied minor.
Anyway, December 31st came around. After an interesting day exploring the picturesque beaches and restaurants of Dubai, my kid, wife, and her brother and family were jostling among the huge crowd gathered at Dubai Creek in the evening to view the fireworks. Like teenagers all around the world, she doesn’t like carrying her iPod in her jeans pocket, and put in my wife’s bag.
As the fireworks began, she asked her mother for the iPod to catch it on video. To their horror, it had disappeared. In a panic, they emptied the bag but the iPod was nowhere to be found. It must have fallen out of the bag’s pocket or perhaps a pickpocket had nicked it. In fact, my absent minded wife had already had a pocket picked once before, in the same city. The child was in tears but the dazzling fireworks, including the drama of a nearby skyscraper going up in flames made her forget about her loss.
A few days later, she returned home, and that’s when I got to hear about the missing iPod. I straightaway signed on to her iCloud account, and tried to locate the iPod using the Find My Phone app. But the iPod was offline. We set the app to notify us the moment it came online, and also have a message pop up on the iPod lock screen, stating it was lost and giving the finder a UAE number to contact.
But we now had a 13 year old without a gadget. Like kids everywhere, she gets restless if separated from her device for too long. She begged us to get her a phone, pointing out that losing the iPod wasn’t her fault. I felt she was too young to have one but she protested saying all her friends had phones, and even school assignments were put onto Whatsapp groups by teachers.
To cut a long story short, she ended up persuading me to get that phone. We pooled all the cash gifts she received for her birthday, a couple of online gift vouchers that were about to expire, my old Android phone that could be exchanged for a discount, and I added the rest and ordered the phone. It was delivered the very next day. Of course, it fell to me to set up the phone.
That’s when it happened.
As I set up her email, a message popped up stating that her iPod had surfaced online eight hours ago in Abu Dhabi, about 200km from where it was lost. The iPod was no longer online but the email gave us its last location on a map.
We clicked on the link and felt like Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson as the screen zoomed in on a location, some 3000 km away, across the Arabian Sea. Soon we were able to identify the exact location and surrounding landmarks. We sent the details with the map to my wife, and told her that if the finder was a honest person, he would have noticed her number pop up on the iPod lockscreen, and called her. We then waited for her response.
It wasn’t long in coming.
“The thief is a honest person and will return the iPod to her daughter.”
Turns out the iPod was in my wife’s bag all the time. Seems the child had pushed it into a tiny slot in her Mom’s laptop bag where its carry belt was stored, and her Mom had not thought of checking that slot.
The kid looked at me with a grin, “Maybe I was meant to have a phone.”
