Getting crossed wires after the theft of a phone

It was fully charged and turned on but promptly vanished off the useful computer programme with a map that tells you where your phone is when it’s lost.

Clearly the miscreant knew of that possibility and had turned it off. I waited as long as I dared before sending out the autodestruct command. I thought my phone was covered for loss or theft as part of my bank’s gold card package, but apparently I had ‘the wrong gold card package, I’m afraid, sir’. 

  With a year left on my phone contract it would be hideously expensive to replace what I had, so I tried to download from iCloud all the data and apps (are you losing the will to live yet?) to my old iPhone 3 that I discarded a couple of years ago.  Uh-oh! Can’t do that – sorry. 

The operating system on your old phone is different. That is after four or more hours wrestling with iTunes and then iCloud and finally phoning for help. 

I am fairly computer savvy for a geriatric and have a reasonable grasp of the processes involved in getting most of the bells I require to ring to do so appropriately on my phone and desktop.  But the circular frustration finally takes its toll when you are told that you need to authorise something and then, when you try to do so, are told that it is already authorised – over and over again.

I wish I were wealthy or uncontrolled enough to vent my spleen by jumping up and down on the offending machines and imagining them to be whomsoever is now unlocking my phone somewhere and flogging it to an unsuspecting punter in the pub.  

But I suppose if I were that person, I could just as easily spend the few hundred quid required to replace my phone and save myself hours of frustration. We are so dependent now on these bits of kit that a mere few decades ago were the province only of the privileged. 

Now every ear you see in the street has clamped to it a supercomputer more powerful than those that took Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon.

We’ve moved on from those inelegant half bricks with big floppy aerials that we thought were the ‘thing’ back in the day.

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