I never thought I’d lose my phone. This was irrational optimism, because I lose everything, all the time, and always have: favorite T-shirts, house keys, and one time, for several hours, my car. So I shouldn’t have been shocked when, on a recent trip, I dropped my iPhone 6 outside the ticketing area at Los Angeles International Airport and didn’t realize it was missing until I was lacing up my sneakers on the other side of the security gate.
The three weeks that followed were expensive and stressful, made more painful by the shame of knowing that they needn’t have been so. Eventually my phone turned up in LAX’s mysterious lost and found, but not before I had to spend hundreds of dollars on a new phone, figure out how to restore access to my two-factor authentication app so that I could use my email, and mourn the loss of what I had assumed were photos and videos I would never see again, some of them capturing people I would never see again.
Even if you’re not an oopsy-daisy type like me, you cannot with full confidence guarantee that you will never lose your phone, break it, or have it stolen right out of your hand. You can take several measures to prevent regular misfortune from becoming a disaster, and most of them require only a few minutes to put in place.
Trust me, it’s worth the time.
