Three years ago, almost to the day, I had occasion to thank Find My Phone. I had been reading a Kindle chapter on the iPhone over a coffee in a café in southern Athens, in Glyfada to be precise, with my bag on a chair beside me. Then the bag wasn’t there, nor were the iPad and MacBook Air it contained. Not surprisingly, my first reaction was panic. Then I thought of Find My Phone and fired it up in time to see my bag disappearing rapidly in the direction of central Athens.
I ran round to the police station and the desk sergeant and I followed the progress of the bag through a riot in Constitution Square right in the middle of town. He got the local flying squad on the job. Then the bag shuffled off down Ermou Street, with the local bobbies in hot pursuit, until two dubious characters were apprehended in the act of selling my computers in Monastiraki flea market. Fair cop, Guv. I was mightily impressed with the efficiency of the Greek police; almost certainly I would not have had such prompt action in London.
Martyr
An hour later the two Artful Dodgers (who were not Greeks, by the way) were were dragged back to Glyfada in chains and I was reunited with my bag and its contents. As Confucius might have said if he’d had an iPad: Keep bag close to person in public market. Of course, I was certainly extremely grateful to Apple’s wizard find-my-device software and sang its praises lustily. Yet this ostensibly satisfying conclusion had legs: Long legs, as it happens.
Fast forward three years and this morning I received an email from a friend in Greece (whose local address I had given to the police back in 2012) enclosing a handwritten summons commanding my immediate presence as a martyr at a trial in Athens. I learned a new word: Martyra means witness in Greek. However, I do not know the Greek word for victim which would be a more apposite description of my situation.
Glacial
I already knew that the wheels of Greek justice grind exceeding slow, but this the stuff of glaciers. I am not sure what the alleged thieves have been doing for the past three years but I doubt they have been enjoying margueritas at Club Med. I hope, at least, they now know what Find My Phone can do.
Fortunately I do not live in Greece so I am unable to flit over at the drop of a gavel. I am now forced to attend the London Embassy of the Hellenic Democracy to swear on oath that I live permanently in the United Kingdom, can’t drop everything to go to Greece and to point out that I made a perfectly coherent and comprehensive police statement in 2012.
Wish me luck, martyr that I am.
Tim Cook and his Find My Phone mullarkey has a lot to answer for.
This is the original story from 2012
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