Walking and finding a phone

It was a lovely spring day. The walking had been lovely. The views were beautiful. The weather was crisp and clear.

There were a few people around, but for the most part it had been a quiet day, despite the car park being full when I arrived at eight in the morning.

I was loving a slow descent along the ridge from High Street to The Rigg which makes you feel like you are on top of the world and gives you panoramic views in every direction.

The “Birds, Beasts and Relatives” audiobook by Gerald Durrell was playing through my jawbone headphones. Occasionally I would pause the audio a few times to locate the skylarks singing overhead, they sing so beautifully.

As I stood for a little while taking it all in a different noise grabbed my attention. Initially I thought that it was on the audiobook, like the reader had inadvertently left their phone alarm on. Something made me stand a little while and eventually I came to my senses and realised that this noise was not coming through my headphones and was nearby. Looking around I noticed, a good way off the path a mobile phone beeping for attention.

Climbing down I picked it up and started to ponder my next steps.

When I initially picked the phone up it was receiving a call, but I wasn’t quick enough to answer it. After that it continued making a noise that I took to be the locator tone that most modern phones allow you to activate.

The phone was, of course, locked, so I couldn’t call any obvious numbers and this wasn’t a time to use the emergency call option.

I was half-way up a hill, which meant that I was also half-way down. There are routes that are mostly up, and some that are mostly down, but this one didn’t have that obvious inclination. If I headed down, there would become a point where there wasn’t going to be a signal and I suspected that I wasn’t far off that point.

While I was in the middle of my pondering a couple passed me, also heading down. Naturally I asked them if they were looking for a phone, they said they weren’t. The woman of the couple then said to me something that made me ponder: “There were those three young lads and the girl heading up the hill, I bet it’s the girls.” The man agreed with a nodding affirmation.

As she said this I was struck by the strangeness of this classification, why would it be the “girl”? What made her think that?

There was nothing on the phone to indicate a potential gender, the phone was in a nondescript plain black cover after all. The background image on the phone was of a group of four young women, but she hadn’t seen that. Even having seen the image I’m not sure I would have leapt to the assumption that the phone belonged to a woman. I’m not even sure why she felt the need to classify it down to one of the group, I would have expected a man to come for it just as much as a woman.

Let’s be clear here, the group being described were people in their twenties, I guess, so not “boys” or “girls”. The couple who had classified them this way can only have been in her thirties themselves. I wondered how they would have felt being defined this way.

Sometimes procrastination is the best approach, I hadn’t finished my food or my coffee and decided that I would sit a while, wait and take in more of the surroundings. All this time the phone continued its occasional beeping, for which there didn’t appear to be any mechanism of responding while the phone was locked. While I sat there, I sent Sue a text to include her in the pondering. The skylarks continued their singing.

As I drank my final mouthful of coffee the phone burst into life with a different tone. Looking at it the screen told me that the phone was receiving a call from “Tom”. A thought flashed through my mind “what do I say now?” It hadn’t occurred to me before that point quite how to answer the phone. Swiping to answer the phone I said to myself “Just say ‘hi’ you muppet.”

Tom was, indeed, a member of the group that the earlier couple had mentioned. He explained that the phone belonged to the woman and that she was on her way back down the path. I stood up, waved to show where I was and told him that I was wearing an orange jacket. He could see me from where he was, and I could see the woman coming towards me. I headed back up the path towards her and handed the phone over. She said thank you, explained how she had been using the phone locator software to make it beep. I explained how I’d found it and wished her a great day walking.

I sent another text to Sue telling her that the phone had been returned to its rightful owner. The skylarks continued their singing.

Heading down I was so disappointed that the couple had been correct in their classification.

Header Image: The phone beeping away as I waited for something to happen. Slightly disappointed that the image has part of my finger it.