I’ve never had good luck with phones. When I was fourteen I lost my first ever cell phone in Florida somewhere between the rental car and airport security. I’ve had several phones that have just stop charging and die, and in my second week studying abroad in Paris, I had my phone stolen on the metro. Since then, I’ve been relatively good with phones – I had the same phone for about two years until one day this past March. I’m going to put it down to karma. It was a Tuesday in Paris, a Tuesday that I should have been at work. But I wasn’t because two of the three classes I had to teach for the day had been cancelled and I couldn’t justify riding the train for three hours just to teach one 50 minute class. So I did what I shouldn’t have done, I called in sick and gave myself the day off. So on my now day ‘off’ I decided to meet a friend in Belleville, one of my favorite sections of the city but is definitely not the, shall we say, nicest. We were going to a rally to save one of my favorite streets in Paris, Rue Denoyez, nicknamed street art alley as it is one of the few legalized spaces for graffiti in the city. I had my camera as well as my laptop, and I was planning on going to a café afterwards to get some work done. After snapping several of the pictures you see above, we wandered back over to boulevard de Belleville just as their Tuesday open air farmers market (les marchés alimentaires) was ending. The market was filled with boxes of fruit and vegetables that had been left behind and there were many people sorting through them to try to find anything salvageable. I immediately hopped in, hoping to snap a few pictures of the disorder. I knew I stuck out so I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, taking pictures of the food rather than the people. That’s when it happened. I had taken a few pictures with my cell phone and instead of placing it back into my bag or into an inside pocket like I normally do I threw it into the wide, shallow outside pocket of my coat thinking I would be taking it back out in a second to snap another picture. In hindsight, I should have known I’d be a sitting duck. After a few minutes of taking pictures I stuck my hand into my pocket and realized in horror what had happened. I immediately had my friend try calling my phone, and of course it went straight to voicemail the thief probably long gone. I sobbed in anger of my carelessness, and a few woman who had been giving me glares before for taking pictures came over and comforted me, probably thinking poor naive white girl. After calming down I did the only thing I could do, I went home. There was no use going to the police, I didn’t have a tracker and they would have rolled their eyes at me. I remember the 40 minute metro ride home to be one of the longest I’d ever taken; with no music to listen to and no book to read I sat in silence, in shame, the pit in my stomach making me feel nauseous. I stopped at the phone store on my way home and told them what happened, they immediately cancelled my sim card and gave me a new one. I went home, changed the passwords to everything that could have been accessed on my phone (though in all likely hood they had immediately wiped the phone once they got it) and emailed my parents to let them know what happened. I then tried to figure out what to do, I needed to get a new phone immediately because my work required me to be reachable at all times. I messaged a friend who I knew had just gotten a new phone to see if he still had his old one, luckily he did and would be home that evening and I could have it. Unfortunately the reason he had gotten a new phone was that his old had had a manufacturing issue, you could make and receive calls but neither person could hear each other (yet when calling via whatsapp or facebook it worked fine). I figured good enough for now (though in hindsight it seems rather ironic to have a cell phone that did everything but make calls) and I would figure out what to do later. You see, this was the end of March and I wasn’t sure my plan yet. My work contract ended in May and at the time I was still trying to stay in Paris. If I knew for certain I was staying in France, I would have just gotten a French phone; but if were going home I would wait till I got an American phone. It was all complicated and what it amounted then to, was me spending the next 4 months in Europe going between broken phones. You see, after two weeks of having this new used phone of my friend’s, I accidently shattered the entire screen. The phone still worked, just the screen was in pieces and I still couldn’t make calls so I decided to try and get another used phone. A friend was selling her old phone, so for $40 euros I bought her almost new HTC mini. The phone was great, really beautiful and had an awesome camera. There was one problem, regardless of what the battery percent was if you opened too many things at once or even just had the data on while listening to music it would instantly die. I ended up having to constantly bring around an external charger for it. After a while I couldn’t handle how often it died so I carried two phones, the broken screen for texting and data, and the HTC for pictures and calling (when I would switch the sim card). I did this for a total of two months while I traveled Europe and stayed in Norway and you can’t imagine I relief I felt when I finally came home to the states and got a brand new 64g Samsung Galaxy S6. That is, until three days later when I was on a boat cruise and dropped it to the bottom of Lake Coeur d’Alene.
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