Bad Day

Today started off okay. The clock sprung forward, but we slept blissfully unaware of its lurch. I made a crab and broccoli quiche for brunch, and we had a nice exercise walk. The weather was improving.

This evening we met friends at Cinemark Movies 6, and that's when things started going wrong. We saw Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. We enjoyed the television show in our youth, and Rotten Tomatoes said that the movie had nearly unanimous critical approval. Well, shortly after the feature started, with unbelievable feats (the hero shoots two enemies as he is falling off a building and survives a crash landing) and lots of slam bang action and loud sound effects. I guess we're just not the target demographic for this sort of film--long on spectacular stunts, loud, fast paced excitement, and star power, but short on character and plot.

After the movie we went to a nearby McDonald's to have a chance to visit with our friends. When the group broke up and we headed for the truck, that's when the day went down the tubes for me. My Droid was nowhere to be found. I remembered pulling it out to play Words With Friends during the trailers, so after checking the restaurant, we headed back to the theater to see if it had been turned in. It hadn't, and a search of the area we had sat in was fruitless (and also darned difficult since another movie was in progress and people were sitting in the seats around where I thought we had sat.

Of course calling the phone wasn't likely to help a lot, since I had complied with the request to "please silence your cell phone." Then I remembered that I have a nifty security app installed on my Droid. It's called Lookout, and it promises to locate your phone via GPS and to make it "scream." The problem was that I hadn't really learned how to use the app to do those things. We downloaded Lookout to Ken's phone, and I logged in. The app offered to add a new device (Ken's phone) to the account, and I agreed.

That was my first mistake. The "locate" function wasn't very precise (within 1700 plus meters), but it showed the phone a few blocks north of the freeway, and we were south of the freeway. Then the Android interface on Ken's Galaxy kept reverting to finding his device instead of mine--very frustrating! I sent a scream command to the phone, and when that didn't help, I sent a "lock" command. Actually the phone was already locked, because since I lost a PDA some time ago, I always keep my devices password protected.

Finally, I gave the woman at the theater our card, and she promised to call if the phone was turned in or found when they cleaned the auditorium. We headed home. On my laptop, I was able to select my phone, and I decided to sign up for the premium service so I could wipe the data. I sent a wipe command, but the software just kept trying to connect. Maybe by now the thief had turned the phone off.

Then I made my second and more serious error. I decided to activate Ken's old Droid on my phone number--not realizing that this move would make it impossible for me to ever wipe the data on my old phone, since it no longer had the phone number associated with my Lookout account. Drat and double drat!


Since we are scheduled to take the rig in for repairs in the morning, we did some of the preliminary work to pack up and move. It was very late when we went to bed and set the alarm for 6:30 a.m., which of course would be 5:30 a.m. by our body clock time!