I always lock my office door at BGU. Always. But at the IDC, being small and ‘exclusive’ and where the kids drive cars that cost as much as some apartments, I’m a bit more lax. I was a bit more lax. If I was leaving the floor, I locked the door. But if I was just popping into a colleagues office two doors down for a quick question, I’d leave the door not only unlocked but semi-open. Yesterday just such a scenario occurred and I popped into a colleague and close friend’s office simply to inquire when we would be departing, since she had kindly offered me a lift home. The answer was ‘like now’ and so I said YAY and returned to my office and gathered my stuff, locked my door and left.

Just after I got home, I discovered I didn’t have my cellphone. Hmmm. Oh right, I’d answered a call just after teaching my last class and about 10 minutes before leaving the university and so I probably left it sitting on the corner of my desk, which is where I sat it down after the call. Silly me. I’ll have to fetch it tomorrow. Only, when tomorrow (today) arrived and I got to my office ….no phone in sight. I searched high and I searched low. There aren’t many places a phone can hide in that office as it is very sparely furnished. We tried calling my phone –it went directly to voice mail rather than ringing. Hmmmmm, that shouldn’t be the case. The phone was fully charged and it was not off. The cleaning folks hadn’t seen it and it hadn’t been turned in. It wasn’t in her car. In other words, someone nicked my phone. Someone nicked my phone in the literally 2 minutes I was out of the office.

So now I have no phone, have no one’s phone number (I mean who remembers phone numbers these days) and am going to have to figure out how the heck to get to Orange and get a replacement given my schedule from hell and my upcoming trip to Japan that is making my pre-departure days more jam-packed and hellish than usual. And I tell you, I feel BEREFT without a phone. It is almost as bad as being without an internet connection.