An iPuzzling Event

So you may recall that back in October I went on a 4 day trip in Egypt. You may also recall my two part post entitled “Max’s Egyptian Tour Guide”, where I laid out 11 “essential” tips to traveling in Egypt. Well… I left one out.

Tip #12: DON’T LEAVE YOUR VALUABLES OUT IN A HOTEL ROOM IN EILAT!!!

In re-reading the posts, I realized that I didn’t mention our one night stays in Eilat both before and after Egypt. It was a nice enough time – we walked around the beach, went snorkeling, had a great meal, and I certainly had enough of a taste to want to go back before the end of the year. That being said, there was a definite downside that I chose to leave off of this blog at that time. Namely, I was a moron and left my iPod touch out in the hotel room, where it promptly disappeared. I realized it when we were packing up to head home, and after tearing through all of my stuff (and the entire room), I headed down to inform hotel security that it was missing. I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions of foul play, but it was certainly a possibility in my mind. After filing a full report with hotel security (Sidebar: Remember this. Important part of the story.), we loaded up the cab, headed to the bus station, and returned to Ashkelon. Being fairly certain I would never see that iPod again, I went to the mall and bought a new one, poured out a 40 for the dearly departed, and moved on with my life.

This was in October of 2009.

Flash forward to Thursday, January 21st, 2010.

After returning home from a successful morning volunteering at Daliyot (and much less eventful than the day from my last post), I was excited to start my weekend. I grabbed my newish iPod (ironically) to check my mail, and to my surprise, found a Facebook message waiting for me from a name I didn’t recognize. It read as follows:

“Hello Max. I'm investigator in Eilat police. Your stolen ipod was found in Eilat. Please contact with me about how to return it to you.”

Um… WHAT???

It takes a lot to leave me speechless, but that one did it. I hadn’t even given the lost iPod a thought in months, let alone wondering if I’d ever seen it again! Stunned, I quickly logged onto Facebook to look at the guy’s profile, just to make sure he was legit. As soon as I logged on, a good friend of mine from Sabra called me since we were trying to find a time to meet up. After catching up for a few minutes, he says, “Oh, I meant to ask you something. Did you lose an iPod or something in Eilat?”

Um… WHAT???

I didn’t know what was stranger – that he would somehow know about this or that he would bring it up literally FIVE MINUTES after I got that message. I asked him how he would possibly know about that, and he told me a police officer in Eilat called him that morning, told him that they had his friend Max’s iPod, and could he please pass on a phone number for him to call. At this point, the story was rapidly approaching the top of the list of “Most bizarre things to ever happen to Max”. I mean, I was completely flabbergasted. And honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever in my life described myself as flabbergasted. Let’s be real, if this happened to you, would you have ever expected to see the iPod again? I was just considering myself lucky that I didn’t have any important personal information on there. But now it had been found? And not only that, but somehow my friend had gotten involved? Are you kidding me?

I tried to guess how they had tracked down the iPod – best I came up with was that it had been stolen after all by someone who worked at the hotel and had a habit of relieving guests of small electronics, and they had just caught them. So, I called the number to find out what had happened. The detective who had contacted me filled me in – they had found my iPod on a homeless guy, who I presume he was doing something illegal, and when he was caught, they found it suspicious that he had an iPod Touch on him. After receiving permission from a judge, they opened up the iPod and found that it was registered to me, and they also found my friend’s name in the contacts list. Interestingly, I didn’t have my friend’s Israeli cell phone, only an American number he had used during camp. So, through the magic of Facebook, they tracked me down. Now then, remember when I said I went to file a report with hotel security? Well, this is where that comes back into play. Turns out that because I never filed a report for the actual POLICE, I needed to go to the Yokne’am police station and file an official complaint under the case file that they opened. Once I did that, they could figure out how to get it back to me.

So, with my coordinator coming along to provide emotional and linguistic support, I headed to the police station to meet with the local detective. (Sidebar: To give you a sense of Yokne’am’s size, I had to wait a few days to go because the only detective was on his day off.) Now, this guy was pretty much what you would expect an Israeli policeman to be: Loud, abrupt, forceful, bald. Slightly intimidating, to say the least. Luckily, he also spoke English, so I was able to give my statement without much trouble. Afterwards, when we asked him what the next step was, he told us that the man would have to confess the iPod was not his, so that the judge could give permission to go into the iPod to confirm that it was mine. So… the next step was something that already happened that set this whole crazy story into motion… awesome!

And that’s where we are now. Will I actually see the iPod again? No idea. What will I do with a second iPod touch? Don’t know. Is this all a massive practical joke? Quite possible. Is there a moral to this story? Outside of the fact that stupidity is sometimes rewarded, not really. But rest assured, you can watch this space for more updates.