Losing "the" phone

To friends, relations, colleagues, contacts, or whoever that might receive a call or a text from this number: 09155567940 and think it is me or from me, IT IS NOT. I lost the phone assigned that number. I am now using another phone whose number I am slowly farming out to the same friends, relations, colleagues, contacts, or whoever. Slowly because, as my Jurassic lost phone suggests, I am slow to these new things.

Before I lost that phone, I used to tell anyone who cared to listen that I never worried about losing it because it was so old nobody would care keeping it. I left it in a tricycle last Sunday morning after Mass in which the gospel talked about prayer. My prayer for the phone to be returned went unanswered. But the driver, who probably never hears Mass, finally had a phone he didn't pray for. The ways of God are truly mysterious.

The phone I lost was a circa early 2000s Nokia. It was so early-days I could not even remember its model series. It was given to me by my boss Sir Miguel Belmonte from among several in his possession. At the time, I was the only one in the entire The FREEMAN office who did not have a cellphone. Frustrated at repeated failures to get through to me by landline, he special-couriered me the phone from his Philstar office in Manila.

I have since then been gifted with a number of cellphones that, over time, kept pace with the latest technologies. But I never kept any of these "smart" phones and instead passed them on to daughters and wife. My use of a cellphone had been strictly limited to calls and texts. So if the tons of extras that came with the iPhones and Samsungs and Oppos made family happy, I was happy too.

I used to attend meetings where everyone around the table would put one, two, three gadgets before them, I would also put my old tiny Nokia before me just to provoke a ripple of unease. One time, we were with a group of telecom bigwigs and one, unable to contain herself, exclaimed: "Naku, nakakahiya naman ‘yung cellphone mo!" Next day I got a top-of-the-line Nokia from her. My daughter was beside herself with glee.

My lost phone had its own story to tell. I was hanging out one time outside the gate to my in-laws' house when the phone apparently slid out of my pocket and fell. For more than 30 minutes, the entire household turned the house inside out. Nothing. The wife finally dialed the phone. No ringing. But outside where I hung out, under water in the canal, frantically lighting up, was the phone. Retrieved, it lost not a single function.

I now have a new phone, an Oppo. Well, not exactly new as I got it as a gift sometime just before I retired. No one in the family wanted it and the wife, always wise, said to keep it in reserve for when my old Nokia finally sputters out. So I kept it as directed, using it only when I needed to play Solitaire to relieve stress. Then I got introduced to Spotify, whose music I amplify via remote speaker to rock the neighbors.

Maybe the loss of my old Nokia had been preordained because not long before I lost it, I finally gave in to the wife's constant nagging about the need to transfer my Nokia contacts to the Oppo which, by the way, we call Oddo, because that is how it is spelled upside down. Just soon after I relocated all my Nokia contacts to the Oppo, I lost the Nokia to the tricycle driver.

So if you get a text or call from 09155567940 that is for sure not me. If the text or call involves some monkey business, report it to the police. I would have preferred for the tricycle driver to just return the phone. Several messages were sent to the number for the purpose but all were ignored. Maybe the driver is like me. Maybe he never had a phone because any money for one always went to family. Now he has a Nokia.