What do you do when you leave your cell phone in a taxi? Easy: scream!
Of course you made a point of remembering the taxi number. (Us older folks always jot the number down on the back of our hand between the liver spots. Not.)
This shouldn’t be hard — just look for that green car that says taxi. In your dreams! There are 400 of the beasts in San Miguel de Allende. To complicate matters this is Mexico. I’ll leave it at that.
On some level I realized I have a co-dependent relationship with my phone. The first recognition of its loss left me with sweaty palms and a rapid heartbeat. There was true fear.
I have been so cynical of the younger members of our family and their addiction to those devices and now here I am suffering withdrawal symptoms. How can this be? I’m too old, too smart, to aware for this to be happening but it is. If I was a drinker it would be a good excuse for a scotch.
Our workers stepped in to help with some very good suggestions. A cynical call for prayer, call the taxi companies and ask them to put it out on their radio network, put up posters at the taxi stands and as a last resort have the local AM radio station announce it with a reward.
I jumped into the first option with less cynicism than they would have thought and then went through the motions for the others. We waited. And waited.
Being the optimistic sort I asked where does one go to buy an unlocked phone in San Miguel? There are a surprising number of places, the two most interesting were slipped to me by a guy at the taco stand with the instructions to go there tomorrow. They buy “liberated merchandise” and yours might be there by then. So we waited some more.
At about 6:00 my electrician’s phone rang. A taxista had heard the announcement on the radio station and wanted to return my phone. Yes, for real. We met up, he gave me my lovely phone and I offered him the 500-peso reward but he refused, only wanting the 50-peso fare for making the trip to drop it off.
As we parted he was very apologetic for taking so long. He was with a fare 70 miles away when he heard the announcement. We parted with me gushing thanks.
This is the San Miguel de Allende I live in.
Bill Holder shared this piece thinking it was time for some positive news from San Miguel.
