The Anxiety of Losing a Phone Mid-Air
by Beth Dolinar, contributing writer
The scary moments came mid-flight from Pittsburgh to New York, and it had nothing to do with turbulence. Reaching under the seat in front of me for my handbag, I noticed that my cell phone was missing. I knew I’d placed it in there before take-off, but I checked elsewhere anyway. It was not in the seat-back pocket and not wedged in the seat around me.
It was gone, probably having slid out of the bag and under my seat during takeoff. It wasn’t there, either. The phone was somewhere on the plane, but where.
And so began a half hour of panic that’s familiar to anyone who has ever been separated from a cell phone. You don’t realize how much we rely on that small rectangle of technology until we can’t touch it.
For me, my phone is mostly just a phone. I don’t scroll social media, play games, listen to music or read emails on it. I do take photos and send and receive texts, but I never bothered to set up any of the other features that would allow my phone to function as a computer. Apps? I have one for cash and another for ride share and that’s it.
On the plane, I looked around to find almost everyone staring at a phone. For any of them to lose theirs would mean the shutting of their portal to the rest of the world. For me I lost far less, and yet my sense of alienation was intense.
Except for the memorized numbers of my son and daughter, I wouldn’t know how to call anyone. Click on the photo of a friend and she hears the ring or gets the text. All those years before smart phones, I knew by heart the numbers of probably two dozen people—some of which I can still recite, though they wouldn’t lead anywhere. Back then the numbers were hand-written in pencil on a curled sheet of lined notebook paper on the cork board next to the wall phone.
Sitting there waiting for the plane to land, I thought about the research required to rebuild my phone number data base: the work contacts, the name and number of the nice handyman who hung my light fixtures, the bicycle repair shop.
“The pictures,” I reminded myself, in a kind of whispered horror. My favorite photo of my daughter, windswept on a lake. The one of my kids and my mom at her last birthday. The photo of my friend and me eating cake at one of our outdoor picnics the first winter of COVID. Were they all lost, or were they up there in that cloud somewhere, able to be rescued when I get the replacement phone?
I think of older people—my parents, for example—-who eschewed smart phones, having found them difficult to master and perhaps superfluous. They know phone numbers, and have small leather-bound books to hold the ones they don’t. And without the imposed immediacy of reaching everyone at any time, they rest assured that the landline phone will ring as necessary.
Calming as that thought was, it was fleeting as I sat there disoriented, missing my phone. I hated the idea of a long wait at the phone store to replace it. And I thought about the rebuilding work that lie ahead.
Just as I was preparing to ask a flight attendant to ask the passengers to look around for my phone, the man in the seat behind me tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around to find him holding my phone.
“You saved me a lot of trouble,” I said as I thanked him.
“I know the feeling,” he said. We all know it.
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About the author: Beth Dolinar is a writer, Emmy-award winning producer, and public speaker. She writes a popular column for the Washington “Observer-Reporter.” She is a contributing producer of documentary length programming for WQED-TV on a wide range of topics. Beth has a son and a daughter. She is an avid yoga devotee, cyclist and reader. Beth says she types like lightning but reads slowly — because she likes a really good sentence.
