I was exausted after a long day, hungry and on a diet, and my teeth hurt from wearing my retainers. All I wanted to do was to be home, change into my pjs and fall a sleep. I did reach home, however as I was getting out of the car my iPhone slipped and fell out, through the water drain to the sewers below!!!

In my panic I tried everything to get the iPhone out. My precious iPhone, the portal to my social media life! Only the iPhone was no where to be seen and after an hour of trying I gave up. I went inside, changed all my passwords and disabled my SIM. I cried all night long and I couldn’t sleep, knowing that I will be buying a replacement in the morning for my iPhone laying deep in the sewers two meters away from me.

This morning however a friend of my husband tells him that his brother’s iPhone fell through the storm drain too and he called the Ministry of Public Work’s hotline and they came and fetched it for him. Skeptic, he called the hot number 112 and he was transfered to a guy called Sameer. Within one hour of his call this morning workers from the ministry came to the drain, opened it up, fetched for the iphone and took it out! Its now sleeping safely at home waiting to be reunited with me once more. Big fat PHEW!

I am lucky my iPhone was retrieved. I feel so relieved and I think it will still be working since I kept calling it all night and it was connecting. However, I don’t think I’ll be able to use it again after submerging it in Clorex. In my case, one of my nightmares of losing my iPhone became a reality last night and in my panic I kept searching online on what to do. My worst nightmare would be if my phone wasn’t lost in the sewers, it would be if it was stolen by some thief. In anycase, here are the steps I found on the net -and I followed- to react in case your iPhone was lost or stolen:

1. 1- Before you disable your SIM, you can go to iCloud.com or to any of your other Mac devices and try to locate your iPhone. In order to do so of course you should have enabled the Find My Phone feature and iCloud on the iPhone itself. If you haven’t, do so NOW. You never know what might happen in the next 5 minutes. I mean it, NOW.
2. 2- If you locate your iPhone in a familiar place and you can retrieve it, fine, do so then. If you can’t or if it was stolen. Use the Wipe iPhone using the Use my iPhone app which will wipe all the apps and data from your iPhone and no one can use them otherwise.  You can retrieve your data from your iCloud and your backups.
3. 3- Now call your telecommunication company and have them disable your SIM. After you’ve tried to locate it and wiping your iPhone clean. May I also suggest that you act swiftly and quickly in case you thought the iPhone was stolen? Panic will make you go lightning bolt fast.
4. 4- Change all your applications passwords, starting with the iTunes one. Its a big drag but if you are serious about identity theft and don’t want anyone tweeting/instagramming/facebooking on your behalf, you should. Some applications like email allow you to revoke access you’ve given to the iPhone, do revoke all accesses when the option is given.

And basically that’s it, that’s what I’ve done myself yesterday. If you have anymore steps to add to the list please do share. May you never experience the loss of losing your prized iPhone or its peers. Big thanks to the Ministry of Public Works and to Mr. Sameer for their unbelievable swift service, I’m very grateful and deeply impressed.