If Found...

A couple of weeks ago I was on my way to pick up Julie from Bat Mitzvah tutoring (yes, round 3, eek!) when my phone rang. I saw on the caller ID that it was Julie, so I figured she was calling to say that she was done early or running late. I said "Hello" and had a split-second heart attack because it was a man's voice on the other end! Luckily he was smart and kind enough to say right away, "Hi, I was out jogging and found this pink LG phone, so I looked at the Contacts and chose 'Mom.'" He described where he found it, which is on the way from our house to the bus stop, so clearly it had fallen out of Julie's backpack and she never noticed! He lives in our neighborhood, although I don't know him, so I drove over and picked it up. We are so lucky that it didn't fall in a puddle or get run over by a truck—and that it was found by a good samaritan! (You may recall that Pete once lost his phone, and within hours I got an email from AT&T saying that the data charges on his phone had just gone through the roof. For the record, they were really nice about not charging me.)

Anyhow, I got to thinking that if Julie had a smartphone with a lock screen, the jogger wouldn't have been able to get to her Contacts. That's the case with my iPhone—if you don't know my password (and aren't a hacker), you can only make a 911 call from the lock screen. So I downloaded an app called Contact Lockscreen Info, which lets you add 2 or 3 lines of text to your lockscreen. It's free if you use one of their wallpaper images or a whopping $0.99 if you want to use your own photo, like this:

Obviously I blanked out the phone number here, but just as obviously it's my home landline and not my iPhone number. If you don't have a landline, you could type in your email address or whatever. You can adjust the size of the type and the color of the banner, too. Nifty idea, huh? (Pete pointed out that writing your contact info on a piece of masking tape and sticking it to the back of your phone is not only free but also still readable even if the phone is dead. He's right, but I like this better, and I figure if a nice person wants to return my dead iPhone to me, they'd just plug it in, as I would if I found one on the street.)

Comments

[Liz Price]

Brilliant idea! Thanks.