What do you do when you Lose your phone?

What do you do when you Lose your phone?

I usually borrow a phone and call my phone.

Did you know there are other ways to find your phone?

Email someone I trust and ask them to call me.

How lost is lost? As in put it down somewhere and just can't remember where, or actually was out somewhere and thought it was in a safe pocket and it wasn't?

1. Do a movement track thing... calm thoughts and figure out where I've been.
2. Consider what I was doing - hubby "lost" his under the driver's seat of the car when it fell out of his pocket and slid under where it *really* wasn't obvious.
3. assume most people are basically honest and make their life easy...
My cell phone has a rigid case which is removed to use the phone. Hubby asked why I'd put our house phone number on the case. Duh...so someone can call the house if they find my phone? My son once found someone's phone. Hubby broke into it, but couldn't find any way to contact the owner till he risked a cold call to someone in her address list called "mom"! Make it easy for good Samaritans - they're out there!

I use my phone so seldom, it is often  days before I realize it is missing. So, calling a dead phone is useless for me.   My process is to check to see if it has fallen into my recliner. Check my vehicles.  Check the office.  Wait.  It always eventually appears.

Edit:
I once lost it in an east coast city of 100,000.   The nice person who found it, figured out which number belonged to my wife and notified her. My wife, knowing the old flip phone was to be replaced, thanked her and asked her to destroy it. When I got home from the trip, I called the lady and thanked her.  That is when things got weird. The stress in the woman’s voice clearly showed she thought she had gotten hold of a stalker.  I got off the phone quickly.   It was pointless to try to destress her.

How do you "break into someone's phone"?  I have a 6 digit passcode on mine.

Pearl Sutton wrote:How do you "break into someone's phone"?  I have a 6 digit passcode on mine.

This was at least 15 years ago and there were ways then. Not sure now... but I expect for techies, there are still ways.

Mine has a crappy  security system, but that's why I put my home phone number on the case - make it easy to give it back, but harder to abuse it. I've been told that many phones are stolen, used to make pricy calls, then abandoned. That was when they were less common.

Hi Pearl,

That is a great question. It never occurred to me that she must have. She said she found it roadside as she was riding her bike. Makes sense.  I was packing up to leave an accreditation survey and probably laid it on the car roof as I was juggling papers. It could have slid off the roof as I was turning. I am assuming a lot, but the only was she could have gotten my wife’s number was through that flip phone. The only possible alternative is that I had checked the phone before I put it on the car roof, and she found it very soon afterward. But that sounds weirder than her hacking the phone.


Edit
This was before 2010.  The initial call came to my wife’s phone and left her phone number. Another possibility is that my wife thought it was the woman who found the phone making the initial call. A call back number was left. Could the contact to my wife have been made through the cell phone company?  That sounds pretty strange as well.  

My wife and I utilize apple products for our phone service, namely Iphones.

They have an app called "Find Devices" that you can use if you lose your phone on another apple product which can help you find your phone. It will 'ping' the phone and give you a map location for you to search as long as the device still has power. You can then make it make noise (if the product has speakers) to help you further pinpoint it.

It has saved my rear a few times.

Now I don't have to type because every word of Tim's answer applies to me situation. That said, I have pockets and misplace my phone only once every two years or so. My wife does it once a week.

for 'small loss' (it's in the house somewhere, but not sure where) I can still use whatsapp on my computer, as long as the phone is charged, and i'll have someone call my phone so i can track it down.

for more serious losses, we have a tracker on the phones for our immediate family as well as my mother in law. It will show where the phone was last active, it's not crazy precise but enough to know blocks and buildings. My mother in law was sure her phone was stolen a few months ago; we were able to determine that she had dropped it in front of the community garden where she has a plot-- by that time someone had returned it to her, but it was a great added use for the tracker.

(the tracker was actually my daughter's idea: we are all rather anxious people and she thought it would be best if we could see if someone was delayed, off normal routes, etc. 95% of the time we don't even open the app, but if someone is late coming home it is a huge relief to open it up and see they're stuck in traffic rather than get upset thinking something terrible has happened. She often spends the night at friends' houses, too. And we all travel a lot, so it's nice to see if the bus got delayed, if someone made their flight on time, etc etc. It makes picking people up a lot more convenient.)

Because of the "my phones are locked" bit, I use someone else's phone to call mine so either I can hear it if it's close, OR if someone has found it, they can answer it. I have also emailed people off my computer to call my phone. I had a flip phone fall and get kicked way under a fairly unmovable object. That was fun to find. Told the guy I was emailing to call once a minute until I answered.

A couple weeks ago I helped a lady who lost hers, it was set on vibrate, we could just barely hear the noise but not find it in her car, I called it and called it, we unloaded her groceries, dug between the seats. She texted me later when her husband finally found it, it had slipped off a seat, into a crack, into the space between a seat cover and the seat, then slid from there in between the the seat mechanisms. He had to remove the seat and take it apart to get it out!  Made us both feel better about not being able to find it while in the grocery store parking lot.

I have an app installed that is open source...

It only works on wifi, but I hit the button and the phone makes noise.

KDE connect..

Took a bit to set it up, but it has several other features I like.

I just checked.  Yes, she could have contacted the company. They would have left a message at another phone on my account.  It sounds like this is relatively common

When my Phone is not with me,  i breath a sigh of relief, and enjoy the peace and quiet... so to find it, is not a panic for me. my phone is in my pocket, on its charger or on desk next to my computer... others in my house have smart phones with ability to track last known position. They seem to use this function every other week.

I came up with a good way to make your phone returnable, if you lose it out in the world, especially if it happens a lot. Neatly write a the number of a recovery phone on paper, write something like "If found please call" and take a picture of it. Set it as your lock screen picture. If someone finds it, they know what number to call to contact you.

1st: I make sure everything on that phone is backed up somewhere. If not to a cloud server, then to an external hard drive, nightly.

2nd: I make sure its password protected, so if someone steals it, or finds it, the phone cannot be entered.

3rd: there is an app automatically on iPhones called “Find My Phone” that allows location of your phone to show up on a digital map on someone else’s device.
It requires Location Services to be turned on 24/7 though (which I don’t like, and hence I don’t use this feature).
But if you’re losing your phone a lot, that’s another good option.

4th: you can put a tracker chip on your phone (perhaps inside the phone cover?) - but it would require another device to show the location.

In Australia people are encouraged to enter the acronym ICE (In Case of Emergency) on their phones with the name and number of the contact they wish a finder to call in case of phone loss or danger.
Maybe ask a trusted friend or family member if they will be your ICE contact.
I've had to use it a couple of times over the years and been glad I put it on my phone.

I was once involved in planning an eco event. Toilets! How to deal with the waste? We needed something mobile to deal with the sewage. So I did a search "mobile sewage treatment". The results? Lots of people being toured around sewage treatment works, phones in breast pockets, peering into treatment tanks - woops! That'll be that f****d!

Last month I was playing sports with friends in a high school field until twilight. I rode to the beach to rinse off and then noticed the missing phone. Retraced my steps/ride all the way back but couldn't find it in the dark. I had it in airplane mode so calling it didn't alert me.

In Android (LineageOS in my case, a FOSS version that mimics Android), go to Settings>Wallpaper and Style>More Lock Screen Options>Add text on lock screen. Add an email address and/or number for backup phone/family/friend's phone.

I went home and in the morning had an email from a high school administrator that the groundskeeper had found the phone.