I have finally done it. The moment when you open your work bag, after not feeling anything different, and you reach in. You scrabble about in there, but with the dawning horror-coloured scarlet red of your own unique concoction of shock, embarrassment, and confusion, along with an unhealthy dash of rage, you realise your phone is gone. And it is probably not coming back. You have lost your phone, and the hurricane of barely contained emotions bears no logic.

I have just spent over 3 hours changing passwords and re-installing apps onto my old phone. I lost my phone at work, which happens to be in toughest places in my area. That usually means that, without being welded to a six-tonne lump of carbon steel, the phone has more than likely found a new home in someone’s pocket. The utter feeling of being unanchored to reality really caught me unawares.

By the time you’ve changed a dozen passwords because of the paranoid fear someone will hack into your phone through biometrics or the pin, you end up talking to yourself, muttering in circular arguments you know you will never win. All driven by the visceral need to just do something about the loss, despite knowing it is all wasted anyway.

The amorphous blob into which all of your passwords and account usernames merge becomes so confusing you end up creating new accounts and accidentally deleting the credentials you actually need for the existing accounts. It is only the saving grace of the thirty-day countdown before your email nukes those deleted messages from your trash that enables you to claw back the dregs and crumbling ruin of your mistake. The pulsating throb in your chest does little to help.

The dark, spiralling, dank tunnel of your own miasmic folly leads inexorably down. Through the layers of fear, the kill zones laden with inner-voice-fed paranoia, the dead end slams you into the realisation that you only have yourself to blame. And that feeds more frenetic attempts to secure the vaporous anomaly that is your so-called digital “life.” Like it has any real import to the reality you live in.

After several hours, during which a litre of high potency guarana energy drink has conspicuously failed to keep you rooted in the physical realm, the self-assignation of blame, that unbearable futility of being responsible, jams enough wasabi into your nether regions to drive you even harder into the spiral of self-recrimination and despair.

You realise that Hell is waiting for the inventors of the smart phone. Every juiced up heart beat that threatens to explode its way out of your chest and send you into premature death can be laid at the feet of sadistic torturers like Steven Jobs and his ilk. You might even utter a frenzied curse at these so-called visionaries, and what would it matter? Your family has already beaten a tactical withdrawal to anywhere in the house but in the room containing you. They have quietly established a three-hundred metre exclusion zone around you and will be pushing dinner at you with a ten metre pole whilst wearing chainmail armour.

In some ways, one has to be pumped about the future of implanting phones inside the skin. Bring on the cyberpunk age. It might be a dystopian Hell, but at least we’ll never lose our freaking phones.