Early last winter, shortly after one of the first snowstorms of the season, as my son was walking home from school, he came across an iPod Touch buried in a snow bank. An amazing find for a boy of 11. Kind of a dream come true. And as the saying goes… finders, keepers. But iPods and iPhones are a funny kind of thing. Unlike, say, stray $20 bills, iPods and iPhones, like wallets and drivers licenses, tend to tell tales about their owners. This iPod Touch was no different than most. With almost no effort we were able to locate the owner, make a call, and return the iPod Touch.
The Gizmodo story, the tale of how Gizmodo came to possess a phone that they shouldn’t have, to me, is filled with the kind of self-congratulatory, fabulist, B.S. that even the worst fiction writers are able to avoid.
Much of the story stinks of unfettered bull, but my B.S. monitor was particularly tuned into the following:
The person who ended up with the iPhone asked around, but nobody claimed it. He thought about that young guy sitting next to him, so he and his friend stayed there for some time, waiting. Powell never came back.
During that time, he played with it. It seemed like a normal iPhone. “I thought it was just an iPhone 3GS,” he told me in a telephone interview. “It just looked like one. I tried the camera, but it crashed three times.” The iPhone didn’t seem to have any special features, just two bar codes stuck on its back: 8800601pex1 and N90_DVT_GE4X_0493. Next to the volume keys there was another sticker: iPhone SWE-L200221. Apart from that, just six pages of applications. One of them was Facebook. And there, on the Facebook screen, was the Apple engineer, Gray Powell.
Thinking about returning the phone the next day, he left. When he woke up after the hazy night, the phone was dead. Bricked remotely, through MobileMe, the service Apple provides to track and wipe out lost iPhones. It was only then that he realized that there was something strange that iPhone. The exterior didn’t feel right and there was a camera on the front. After tinkering with it, he managed to open the fake 3GS.
He reached for a phone and called a lot of Apple numbers and tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to the right person, but no luck. No one took him seriously and all he got for his troubles was a ticket number.
He thought that eventually the ticket would move up high enough and that he would receive a call back, but his phone never rang. What should he be expected to do then? Walk into an Apple store and give the shiny, new device to a 20-year-old who might just end up selling it on eBay?
What bugs the hell out of me about this whole Gizmodo tale is just how easy it was for my son to return the iPod Touch he found last winter. Fact is, it took no effort at all. One phone call, done. It just took the will to do the right thing and defy the desire to keep the iPod for himself. That was by far the most difficult task.
I think this Gizmodo story is bull. It may bear some small resemblance to the truth, but it stinks of bad fiction. Just how much fiction remains to be seen.