Don’t Let the Good Times Roll Too Far

After a rough couple of weeks, I’d been looking forward to a fun road trip with my friends because I was under the mistaken impression that I was capable of having a good time. It’s okay, though. Sometimes, to get out of a funk, you need the healthy reminder that nothing matters in the grand scheme of things. It’s like when you’re worrying about an exam and then you find out your family’s new tutor is an imposter and your brother doesn’t actually need an art therapist and the house lights aren’t motion-detecting and, suddenly, you stop worrying about the exam. Foolproof.

Yes, a Parasite reference. This will be me to you if you don’t watch it soon.

My friends and I road-tripped from Austin to New Orleans for Mardi Gras weekend, deciding to visit the infamous Bourbon Street just hours after we’d unloaded into our AirBnB. NOLA has an open container law, meaning you can drink alcohol on the streets. So in the left pocket of my utility jacket, I stuffed two cans of Angry Orchard, and in my right, a third can along with my phone. I asked my friend to bring a bottle of water for the seven of us, because priorities.

Bourbon Street was littered with empty bottles, crumpled flyers, unidentified liquids, and several empty phone cases and ID’s. Drunk people teetered into and away from each other like the crowd was executing a poorly coordinated wave. We waved excitedly upward at people tossing out purple, green, and gold beads from the balconies above. A couple people on the streets, likely taking pity on me, draped some around my neck.

Friend, to Balcony Man: Can we just have one??

Balcony Man: *gestures that we should flash him*

Friend: *gestures to us* But we have nothing!

In the thick of the crowd, I suddenly felt my jacket lighten, and I reached for my phone. It wasn’t there. I saw an iPhone on the ground, but it turned out to be some other lucky sod’s.

Me: My phone, worth hundreds of dollars, and everything in my phone wallet for like $20 worth of pearly beads.

Me:

A man barreled into me, and I found myself on the ground, disoriented. (In hindsight, I realize someone else might’ve been trying to steal my phone only to find I had already been robbed, which I find kind of funny. If not that night, my phone would’ve been stolen at some point that weekend anyway.)

Other friends accompanied me to retrace our steps—considering we’d only gone to the bathroom in one bar, was less than a block—just to humor me. It was definitely gone. The one person who I share my location with said it had gone off the grid. The thief had immediately turned it off.

Shamefully, we returned to our AirBnB only to find the door open and the hallway mirror gone. I made a beeline for my room to find my laptop not in my suitcase. The collective of seven incapacitated brains immediately concluded that someone, ignoring all the other electronics left in the open, had robbed us. Two minutes later, we remembered that there were two other people living with us who’d probably arrived later than we had and (inexplicably) decided to nab the mirror for their room. I then found my laptop under the covers. It was all too much for my heart.

In the living room at 2 or 3 AM, mind still fuzzy from the Angry Orchard and still processing the grief from losing my phone, I struggled with the unresponsive AirBnB WiFi to salvage what I could of the situation. I gathered info to apply for another driver’s license, deactivated my student ID, and researched credit freezes. I emailed my roommate, as my apartment key had also been in my phone case. I disabled the phone’s IMEI, rendering core functions unusable, because, as a rule, no one gets to capitalize on my misfortune except for me.

What really got me, though, was the two-factor authentication. In trying to find and disable my iPhone, I tried to get onto my iCloud only to find it locked. We’ve texted you a verification code, it said.

The more feature shrinkage, the less impressed I am.

I would’ve thrown the phone I was calling my mom on across the room if it not for the fact that it wasn’t mine, because, remember, I DIDN’T HAVE A PHONE.

The next day was a causal chain of unfortunate events as I discovered, one by one, new hits to my quality of life. Two-factor authentication, especially when there was only an option to include a recovery phone and not an email, locked me out of Venmo, (I suppose conveniently) preventing me from paying my friends back temporarily.

I was also locked out of my email when trying to print a temporary ID. (Thankfully, I’d already sent the document to my friends. If there was going to be identity theft, I said, might as well make it a party.) The temp license, which was just a piece of paper that I could’ve made on Word, looked fake.

Me: It’s okay. Clean slate. If bars don’t let me in, I’ll just hang out on the streets.

Friends: *look mildly concerned*

Me: I mean, what else could they take from me? I have nothing.

Because of course I went back to Bourbon the next night, and of course spending that time with friends made for one of the best nights of my life—that wasn’t surprising. What I hadn’t expected was what I was told back in Austin at T-Mobile.

Me: I was out of town this weekend and got my phone stolen. Could I get a new SIM card to put in my friend’s old phone?

T-Mobile rep: You know, I’ve been having people come in for this all day.

Me: The devil works hard, but the phone thieves at Mardi Gras work harder.

T-Mobile rep: I don’t know what people think they can do, stealing phones, now that you can’t really get beyond the lock screen anymore.

I sat at one of the tables to wait as the iPhone restored my iCloud backup. Not five minutes later, a man walked in.

Man: I was out of town this weekend and got my phone stolen. Could I get a new SIM card to put in my friend’s old phone?

Same situation, I assumed, except unlike me this man hadn’t brought his passport as ID. He desperately tried calling his brother, who was at work and/or an asshole. Encountering another victim of this prolific serial phone thief, I felt, briefly, validated. I’ve realized, for times of desolation, maybe what we all really need is not love and chocolates but the knowledge that someone out there shares your specific misery and you’re faring better than he is.

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