I Lost My Phone...

...but there's a happy ending. This only has to do with football in the very most remote sense, but what the heck. You're reading anyway.

My phone fell out of the pocket of one of our equipment bags. I think it actually happened before practice started. But I didn't notice it missing until after practice, then persuaded myself that it was somewhere else in the bag, or that I'd hadn't brought the thing with me anyway.

(I mean, with Weis and Crennel on board now, I'm just not getting the number calls from Todd that I used to get during practice last year, so I should be fine leaving the phone at home.)

So believing the phone safely at home - a fancy Verizon droid phone mind you, with way more stuff than I really know how to use - I left. It was hot, I was tired, and I figured if it wasn't at home it was in one of the  football bags or my clipboard and I'd find it later.

You do this don't you? If you can't find your phone, you call it? I have a rather, ahem, distinctive ringtone that one of my children established for me. Even if I knew how to change it, I probably wouldn't, because it deeply embarrasses my other children and my wife. And that's what I live for.

So I called my missing phone, listening intently for waka waka waaaaaka waka waka waaaaaka waka waka waaaaaka waaaaaaa. (I told you. Distinctive.)

It didn't ring. It didn't ring in the car, or either football bag, or anyplace else in my home.

Now for ordinary football coaches, this would be a nightmare scenario. You've come home from goofing off all night at football practice, and you've lost your fancy cell phone.

"Why Jim" you say, "You don't goof off at practice. You and all the coaches work very hard with our children to give them a great practice, even in the heat and when things are difficult. You're patient, and kind, and the kids have fun, and it certainly doesn't seem to take all night.. you don't seem to be goofing off at all!" To which I respond, yes, thank you so much for noticing and no, it does not seem like goofing off to me at all, except that I must confess - I think practice is fun. By definition you see, anything that I think is fun is defined as 'goofing off' in our household. You may use your imagination to determine which family member of mine might hold this opinion. 


But no, as I said, I'm no ordinary football coach. I am, in fact, a card-carrying, pocket-protecting, bona-fide, full-on, unabashed Geek - and yes, that's Geek with a capital G.

This deep Geekiness has caused me to install several really useful 'apps' upon my Droid phone. App is short-hand for 'application' and it means a little program that runs on a phone. The app that saved my bacon last night is called, as you might expect, FindMyPhone.

FindMyPhone is, at its heart, a text answering machine. When I installed the FindMyPhone application, I told it to do two things, and it does those two things very happily. First, I told it that whenever it receives a text from any phone that says a very special keyword, it will ring like crazy. It will ring even if the phone is on silent. So no matter where I've lost the blamed thing in my house, the waaka waka etc. will reunite me with my cell phone.

Second, I set up another keyword that texts a reply back the exact GPS coordinates of my phone every five minutes, until I tell it to stop.

This is way cool. Because Google maps will show you, within just a couple of feet, the precise location of a set of GPS coordinates.

Last night I sent my text-me-back keyword to my phone from my son's cell phone, and a couple of minutes later he received a text with the following coordinates: 38.92975778333336,-94.82969685

If you key those GPS coordinates into Google Maps, and then switch to their satellite imagery map, you'll get a picture like this one:

Can you see the green arrow? No, no, not the comic book character. The green arrow right beside the long jump runway.

That's where it said my phone was.

By the time I managed to get FindMyPhone to cough up this information, it was dark. (It isn't dark on the picture Mom, because that's an old image, and they just superimposed the arrow over it. They didn't really task me a satellite, so please don't tell Dad that I have that type of power.) So I went back out there with another cell phone, texted the ring command, and sure enough it bird-dogged me right to it. Buried in a deep patch of grass about a foot away from the green arrow location, there was my expensive black phone, upside down and all but invisible to the naked eye.

Like I said, this doesn't have much to do with football, other than the field. But it is sort of a neat story, if you're into that sort of stuff. Plus, I wanted to write about it. More goofing off I guess.