Replacing my lost cell phone turned out to be ridiculously complicated. Multiple phone calls to Xfinity developed into a Kafkaesque nightmare. There was zero consistency between what one person told me and what the next person told me. It was maddening. Ultimately, to resolve my situation, I had to visit the Xfinity store in town a handful of times.
The second of my four or five visits was the longest – nearly three hours! What was I doing there for so long? I don’t know! I was attended to by a service rep who was interacting with his tablet and his mounted desk computer and speaking over the phone to his special contacts in the Xfinity mobile department far away, and also to his supervisor at the store. (He would excuse himself a few minutes at a time to consult the supervisor.) He was working on: a) recovering my old phone number from the lost phone; and b) trying to get me a new phone that I wouldn’t have to pay full price for. He would occasionally try to explain the details of his process to me but he may as well have been speaking in Mandarin.
He did, however, correct a misconception I’d had regarding my lost phone. I had assumed that, since that “line” had been “deactivated,” this meant that the phone would no longer work. This was a relief to me because I knew someone had possession of the phone; they had been downloading roughly a gig of data per day (whereas I use less than one gig per month), which I was aware of because Xfinity had been sending me emails about it. But it turned out that the phone – which I’d never locked (DUH!) – could continue working indefinitely; it just couldn’t make outgoing calls or take incoming calls anymore. But it could still download data in any wifi zone. And … my old text threads and sound files and photos would remain completely available to whoever was holding the phone.
Riding my bicycle home, I thought what an idiot I was to have never locked my phone. Just a simple precautionary common-sense measure that EVERYONE takes (except, of course, me). My thinking had gone something like this: I don’t take my cell phone around much anyway, and I’m not likely to lose it because when it’s with me it stays in my backpack.
Yeah, well. It never occurred to me I could lose the whole backpack.
But then I had another thought. Okay, so the thief (I now thought of the unknown person who had been downloading a gig of data per day on my cell phone as a thief) can read my text threads and listen to my sound files. Being a thief, this person is likely a bit of a degenerate. My text threads are loaded with expressions of love. And the sound files …. Well they’re amazing! They are what I’m grieving most because nearly all of them – two or three dozen – are songs I’ve recorded people singing in live contexts, at singing circles and around fires. Beautiful, inspiring songs from Singing Alive culture. (Check out the preceding link if you don’t know what I mean.)
So maybe, just maybe, all the personal stuff on my phone could conceivably have a healthy, beneficial impact on the thief, and that might be a good thing. Maybe the thief needs those songs more than I do.
With this thought, I noticed that I felt a lot better.
And then, noticing that I felt better, I realized it’s true what so many wise people have said — that it’s not so much the events that occur in our lives (that is, “what happens to us”) that determines our experience, but rather how we think about things, how we frame things. And we always have the power and the option to frame things in a way that is meaningful, and can make us happy.
Or actually, if not always, certainly most of the time, for those of us living in peace and relative comfort.
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