Big Brother is Watching You

I teased it here, tweeted about it, and posted to Facebook. So by now, it shouldn't be of any surprise that my iPhone was stolen.

And by stolen, I mean, "picked up by someone after I left if somewhere, but that someone did not return it to Lost and Found and instead left the store and started driving away from the mall."

So, not lifted from my purse, but lifted from the place where I accidentally left it (um, the top of the toilet paper dispenser in a bathroom in Macy's). Found it, I'm sure, while I was STILL IN THE BATHROOM washing my hands, since there was a line for the stalls and I'm quite sure with my big, white case, the person saw it as soon as she walked into the stall.

I washed my hands, left, met Mike outside, and walked a few stores down to get a Diet Coke. As we are standing in line for the soda, I realize it's missing. Ten minutes, tops.

I ran back to Macy's, but it was already gone from the stall. We went up to the management office and reported it as lost. We were calling it and calling it and nothing.

Since I was in Tyson's, I went to the Apple store.

People, if you have an iPhone and you do not have MobileMe, get it. You are smoking crack if you don't think the $99/year is worth it. MobileMe gets you three very important things in my opinion (it gives you more, but these three are what I think are the biggest, and the rest is just extra fluff):
1. It will activate the GPS on your phone, and from a website, you can track the location of your phone.
2. You can remotely make your phone cause sound, and display any message you want on the screen.
3. You can remotely WIPE your phone clean, so it's a completely dead and empty phone. All your contacts, emails, apps, and information, gone. poof.
4. You can save certain things from the phone (like contacts and calendars) in a "cloud," so when you do purchase a new phone, those things automatically populate. (The cloud thing works on documents online, too -- like I can save documents through the MobileMe website on my account and then access them from anywhere, like Google Docs).

Okay, that's FOUR important things MobileMe gets you.

Back to the Apple store on Monday. I log in to my account on one of their computers and track the phone. If it's showing it's still in the mall, it could be that someone returned it to an employee at Macy's and it just hadn't made it's way back to Lost and Found yet.

But, no.

The mall was Tyson's Corner.

My phone was somewhere on Rt. 50.

AND MOVING.

We kept refreshing the tracking page, and there the phone went, down Rt. 50.

I made the phone beep. I sent the message that the phone was being tracked, please call [Mike's cell] to return it.

Then I wiped it clean.

The upside? I got a new iPhone 4. My joke from last week that Contagious Communications was going to give all it's employees a new iPhone 4 for Christmas actually came true.