Last Wednesday, at a colleague’s leaving drinks in a central London pub, my MacBook was stolen out of my bag. Thanks to Apple’s intriguing but mostly useless “Find My…” function, which tracks its products, I have been able to follow my laptop on its subsequent adventures. It doesn’t give a live position, but provides updates when it links, via Bluetooth, to other Apple devices (It doesn’t want to log in to Wi-Fi, because then the various erase and block functions can kick in).
For the past five days I have been watching my MacBook’s progress, imagining the people involved and thinking dark thoughts along the lines of the South Korean revenge horror film, Oldboy.
The first time I checked, “Ed’s MacBook” was on Whitehall, just outside the Trafalgar Theatre. At this point, I still harbored dreams I had left it somewhere or dropped it and it was slowly being returned to me by a friendly cabbie or other Good Samaritan.
Apple’s functions also allow you to remotely wipe the machine, which I did, or tried to, and send messages to whoever opens the machine. Anyone who opened the MacBook would have been met with the message: “THIS HAS BEEN STOLEN, PLEASE RETURN TO ED CUMMING AT THE TELEGRAPH.”
That dream died over the weekend. Ed’s MacBook had moved from Whitehall to an address in Archway. I still thought this might be the home of a kindly cab driver, taking time out of his exhausting gig-economy life to google “Ed Cumming + Telegraph” and sifting through dozens of jejune lifestyle articles in hope of finding an address. On Friday it appeared at Stansted Airport, somewhere deep in the terminal building. The omens were not good. By Saturday evening it was in Algiers. By Monday morning it had moved a few miles down the road, where it was apparently in a tower block on the “Avenue des Freres Bouadou, Bir, Algeria”. And I’d found it tiring going to Petersfield for the weekend.
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