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.
I’m sorry to hear that! Does your phone have GPS in it? If so, maybe the phone co. can track it.
I hope that the phone does have GPS on it, that might be good. What can someone do with a stolen phone? Can it be reprogrammed and used? A man in the bank I use here thought he had lost his phone or rather that it had been stolen, and for the time that it was missing, he was quite worried and said that it could create problems. I wondered what kind of problems. At least your laptop was not stolen, Yaeli, but you must be extremely cautious because it seems that theft is a problem in Israel as well as elsewhere. Remember when workers in your apartment building stole your two laptops and broke into your apartment? All your work gone as well as your computers! Theft must be a constant concern in Israel as the windows in most apartments have bars and an array of security devices. Quite unfortunate.
I keep thinking I have lost my phone and buying new ones. Then I find it. So I have a bunch of Pay As You Go phones that I just put in a drawer.
What are you doing in Japan? I used to fly there all the time.
Hmm, another reminder of how evil the world is. I must admit, I make the same kind of mistake. I often leave my office during a day, to get a coffee, to greet clients, etc. My assistant also is very busy and is in and out of her office. A fast thief could easily gain access. Though we have a policy that no outsider is to roam the hallways without being escorted by staff, we do have about 40 offices and meeting rooms. My partners, associates, assistants and clients create considerable traffic… May be I really need to find that key to my office and use it again.
But what is worse and also should serve as a warning: one of my associates reported two days ago that his laptop had been hacked while on the internet. Luckily we protect our firm files with strong encryption and he had no open files at that time, but all his personal information is now somewhere out in the wild. Scary.
My phone broke a while ago and I lost all phone numbers and messages - does anyone backup their phone data? I don’t.
SirJohn - yes, that s scary. Which OS is he using - and how did he realize it?
Somebody outside, has been waiting for you to leave your room unattended.
I routinely backup my cellphone’s phonebook to my PC. So far, tfu-tfu-tfu, touch wood, I haven’t found it necessary to restore the backup to a cellphone.
@waterkant
He uses windowsXP. It seems he inadvertently opened his own computer to the outsider by using a teleconference program. He became suspicious a while later but it was too late, the logfiles showed that the outsider had transferred out a copy of his personal files. Not funny. Luckily no business files were transmitted. They would have been encrypted, while the guy did not encrypt his personal files.
I ordered a round of IT-security training for the complete staff. There goes a weekend
Yikes Sir John can you recommend a good encryption software for us to use for our personal files? This makes me very nervous.
Waterkant — oy replacing phones is a hassle isn’t it?! I’m off to Japan to see my beloved brother wed (to a nice Japanese Shiksa) and give a talk.
TDDpirate — I’m impressed. I’m not that phone savvy and couldn’t even figure out how to transfer pictures off my cellphone –unlike with a camera, my computer didn’t seem to recognize that anything was attached when I connected the phone.
Mongrel — I think it was an opportunity thing. Someone walking by saw the door open but office empty and the cellphone sitting there in a tantalizing “grab me” spot.
We use Jetico’s BestCrypt. htt p://www. jetico. com/
What is it with you women, allways this “grab me” line.
How to connect phone to a PC:
Depends upon the phone model used by you. Basically, there are Bluetooth, USB cable, IR (infrared, getting obsolete) and proprietary cable connecting to the PC’s serial port (obsolete).
Then you are supposed to have gotten with your cellphone a CD with software for installation on your PC (useless for me as I use Linux rather than MS-Windows, for which such software is usually developed - but Linux has other relevant software packages).
In my case, I connect the cellphone by USB cable to the PC, which recognizes it as a memory device (like DiskOnKey). Then I locate the phonebook files in the cellphone and copy them over to the PC.
Opportunist thieves cruise university academics’ offices looking for open doors; they were doing the same in my university twenty years ago, down to being able to spot the door left open for a couple of minutes whilst the owner of the jacket hanging on the back of the chair went down the corridor for a few minutes.
So easy, because they can just present themselves as visiting students, looking for friends– and carry sporty looking bags into which they stash their haul.
One of the great things about iPhones is that the recharge process via the computer backs everything up via iTunes. Including your address book and your diary.
Another place that thieves lurk is in hospitals, especially outside intensive care units.