Keeping track of friends is a hard thing to do at the best of times. Keeping in contact with them all is harder at times. The important thing however is to be sure that the contact details you have are current... actually, it is even more important to actually have their contact details.
That is why it was very difficult to acknowledge that I had lost everything on this fateful day. Every single contact that I had, every single friend of mine, every single new friend that I had made as I travelled around the globe... all lost.
There was no backup at the time. No other place that they were all stored. No paper copy nor some other way I could recover what was lost. It was gone, and in some cases, irretrievably.
What happened? My phone was stolen, and all of the information it contained disappeared with it. I had caught the local bus into town as part of my work activities. It was my first day back from Paraguay and I was not just tired, but exhausted.
Waiting for my phone to send an email, I collapsed into a deep sleep due to my exhaustion. With a start I awoke and discovered the bus was already stopped at my get-off point. I grabbed my bag and jumped off the bus, not knowing that the phone had fallen from my hand while I slept.
It was over an hour later that I realised the loss. The bus had made several rounds by then, with more than one hundred people boarding and getting off during that time. When I finally found the bus and the driver, there was nothing to be found. It was lost.
A phone call to my number was answered by a man that gave no details to identify himself and who made a false promise to return it. After that there has never been an answer. Now the phone was not just lost, but it had been stolen.
There was nothing more I could do. My phone was gone, and all of my contact details with it. I had just recently purchased this phone while in Chile (see
New Phone entry) and spent hours transferring all of my contacts to it from my old phone. The contacts in the old phone were kept for a while, but eventually erased (just before this incident) to prepare the phone for sale. So I was left with nothing.
The lesson from this experience is, of course, to have a backup. The irony was that it was that very night that I had planned to back everything up. I missed it by only a few hours. Doh!