twitter saves my phone

If you don't know what Twitter is, it is simply another social networking website. Someone can update their Twitter page with a "tweet" and all of the people who follow them on Twitter (just like your "friends" on facebook) can see the update. Feel free to check it out for yourself.

My friend Alan Meincke convinced me to get on Twitter a while back and I have enjoyed it for the most part. However, after the events of last Thursday, I really appreciate being on Twitter.

In a way that I have yet to figure out, my phone fell out of my pocket while I was in chapel at Asbury. Within moments of leaving chapel I realized I didn't have my phone. After an unsuccessful return in search of it, I assumed that my phone was long gone. For the rest of the afternoon, I began wondering how much it would cost to buy a new phone and how difficult it was going to be to retrieve numbers that I had stored in my contact list.

However, right before I finished my last class of the day, I received an email informing me that my phone was in the student center and I should come by to pick it up. Beyond being relieved, I began wondering not only how it found its way to the student center, but also how they had identified the phone as mine.

So this is how the phone was traced back to me. Upon being turned in at the student center, the lady working the desk began scrolling through the contacts in my phone to see if she recognized any of the names. She apparently recognized the names of several other seminary students in my phone and called their phones in the hope that they would be able to identify whose phone had called theirs. After four unsuccessful attempts, the lady saw the "twitter" contact in my phone. (one feature of Twitter is that you can 'text' an update from your phone and it uploads to your profile) Therefore, Jessica, the lady working the desk, sent a tweet to my profile stating "your phone is at the student center. please come get it :)"

After uploading the tweet, she logged into her Twitter account. Because she is a friend who follows me on Twitter, she saw that my profile had been updated with the status "your phone is at the student center. please come get it :)". Now realizing my profile had been updated from the tweet she sent using the "lost" phone, she emailed me to let me know that she had my phone.

On one hand, this seems like a crazy way to go about identifying the owner of a phone. At the same time, it is yet another function of Twitter which makes me happy that Alan convinced me to get on it. I'm sure that the creators of Twitter never imagined this social networking site would be used to locate lost cell phones. But alas, it has.


So to Alan, I say: Thank you!
To Jessica, I say: Thank you!
And to Twitter, I say: Thank you!

Phone crisis averted. Peace retained. Communication still in operating order.