Status-Q

I think I’ve lost my UK mobile. It may be in the back of a cab somewhere, or under a plane seat, or lying in a Wellington gutter. Anyway, I can’t find it. (So friends and family should note that it is not a good way to contact me at present!)

Normally, you have a good chance of finding mobiles simply by calling them. But this one is switched off, or the battery is dead; I just go straight through to my voicemail.

I want a way to switch it on remotely. Perhaps a phone could wake up every half hour, check for any messages, and if you had sent it a special text it would respond in some way – emailing you what it could deduce about its position, for example, and staying on for a while so you could call it.

The frustrating thing is not knowing whether it’s here in my hotel room somewhere, or hundreds of miles away in Auckland airport, or lurking under some Wellington restaurant table… I may never know.