16 November
Left my phone on the bus this morning and realized how much of my so-called life is/was trapped in that stupid thing. Partly hoping that an honest Swede will have picked it up and handed it in to SL but also secretly hoping it is gone for good. Seems I’m locked out of my email account, too. Time for a tabula rasa?
16 December
Well it seems that the Hittegods have smiled on me. One month after leaving my phone on a Stockholm bus, two weeks after resigning myself to never finding it again and just one day before departing Sweden (temporarily) for a festive season filled with peanuts, pineapple daiquiris and other signature cocktails courtesy of Daves Bar and Grill (apostrophe absent by design), lo and behold a letter from SL informing me that ‘something’ of mine has been ‘found’.
At the Hittegods customer service counter, the attendant tells me i have an Irish accent, and when i inform her of my antipodean heritage asks me why i would even bother coming back to Sweden.
I’m just a little bit too slow in my response but if i had my time again i would simply reply that any country where you can lose a mobile phone and then have it handed back to you, four weeks later, complete with a sticker bearing your full name, can’t be quite as bad as the bone-freezing climate and casual racism would tend to suggest.
