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As I write this, I'm hunched over my laptop in many many layers of clothing, shivering and more tired than I've been in a really long time. It's awesome. I had the craziest 24+ hours, so bear with me if this tale of epic proportions comes out a little convoluted.
Unrelated backstory: My winter break technically starts on Monday, so on Friday I ran out of school, got in my friend's car to the train station, and went downtown to see Grouplove in concert. They were freaking AMAZINGSAUCE AND JUST wow. This band is just really charming? Their music is fantastic and a little odd, and everyone in the band reflects that. The show could not have been more awesome. It's kind of impossible to describe in words. Additionally, if you're into alternative-type stuff, their opener "twenty one pilots" was really really good and you should check them out. The only way I can describe them is if My Chemical Romance had a one night stand with Fun., and they conceived a rapping baby who likes the ukulele. Weirdest band ever... I love it.
Now that's out of the way:
THE STORY OF THAT TIME WE FOUND AN IPAD IN A TAXI
Once upon a time, my friends Abby and Haley and I hopped in a cab. Sitting on the seat my friend Abby's butt was attempting to occupy was an iPad in a fancy black case. She looked at the cabbie and asked, "Is this iPad the cab's?" The cabbie ignored us at first, but we told him our destination and he said that he knew nothing of an iPad. The three of us looked at each other, shocked and the slightest bit amused. Attempting to unlock the device was to no avail; a a four-digit passcode is virtually impossible to guess at randomly. We discovered that the iPad-owner was most likely a man in his late fifties who had two daughters and might own a boat. At least, according to the background, he'd been on a sailboat at least once in his life. Further exploration of the rubbery case revealed a fancy business card. The iPad owner now had a name, place of employment, and phone number. My friend Abby, being more outgoing than Haley and I, left him a voicemail with her name and number, explaining that we were now in possession of his iPad and he should contact us so we could return it.
I shoved the iPad in my backpack, attended a concert (where I danced and jumped around like a ridiculous person because I am ridiculous) and generally forgot about it. I mean, we couldn't help but look at each other every few minutes and go holy crap there's a random guy's iPad in your backpack at first, but we were in a pretty tight crowd, and we quickly realized this wasn't a statement we wanted a whole lot of strangers to overhear. The iPad, miraculously, survived the concert completely unscathed.
After the concert, we got in another cab with no fun surprises lurking in the seats. Jim, (we repeated the owner's first and last name like a weird mantra all day today... I'll just give you his first name so you can't contact him and tell him how creepy I am. Trust me, it's about to get a lot weirder.) the owner of the iPad, hadn't called us back yet. We were concerned, because the voicemail was clearly a work number, and what are we supposed to do with this iPad if he didn't call back until after Christmas? What's the expiration date on these things... like, when's it Kosher to call it "ours"? And which of the three of us gets it? My friend Abby technically found it, but I lugged it around all night. Sell it and split the profit? Try to unlock it and just share??? Give it to someone we know in the spirit of Christmas??
We pondered these questions as we made our way to a friend's couch to crash for the night. On that couch, we unsuccessfully attempted to crack the number passcode again, and realized that there was another button available. Here's where my criticisms of Apple begin because though I am incredibly creepy, the amount of personal information I was able to gather about this man without unlocking his iPad is kind of frightening.
On the original iPad, if you can't unlock the screen, there's an option with a little flower icon. Click it, and you can magically watch a slideshow of EVERY SINGLE PICTURE STORED ON THE IPAD. At first, we didn't think twice about watching the slow fade of Jim's personal pictures flash across the screen. We saw a happy little family, a mother, an eight-year-old son, and a seven-year-old daughter, and a three-year-old daughter vacationing on Lake Michigan. The pictures weren't taken with an iPad, but a family digital camera. Before our eyes, the children grew up. Suddenly they were gangly preteens at apple orchards, then at the Vatican meeting the Pope. The quality of pictures shifted, and the iPad itself was now the camera in use. Our friend Jim was clearly affluent, because besides meeting the Pope a few years ago, he recently took his family on a vacation to Paris. The children jumped in age again, and actually looked pretty near our own ages. And well... the son aged rather nicely. Like, really really nicely. He took very goofy pictures in front of the Eifel tower, in the gardens of Versailles, and at various cafes. It was incredibly entertaining. (Can we just imagine if I met Jim's hot son? I want us to fall in love and get married so our "how-did-you-meet" story can be: Oh, my friend found his dad's iPad in a taxi cab, I watched him grow up via slideshow, thought he was cute and stalked the crap out of him. It's the only appropriate romance for my strange, strange life.)
After watching the slideshow of 100+ pictures, we abandoned any semblance of not-being-total-creeps, and gave this guy a google. The Catholicism and Affluence observations were spot-on, as we found our friend Jim on Forbe's website listing him as a powerful investor (and estimating his worth as a whoolleeee lotta $$), and a chairman of Catholic Charities International. And we had his iPad.
It was a weird fact that I couldn't stop rolling around in my head. I tried over and over to unlock the thing, taking guesses at his wife's name, their possible anniversary dates, and any of his children's birth dates/names. (We decided the son was definitely a "Jason" or "Patrick," and the mother clearly a "Jill.")
In the morning, when I was unfortunately using the facilities, Jim finally payed my friend Abby a phone call. Our plan for the day was pretty amorphous but we were set on going to see the Lincoln Park Zoo's Christmas Lights once it got dark. Abby arranged to meet Jim at the zoo at five PM. The day turned into one long build-up to finally meeting our friend Jim. I fantasized that he'd take advantage of the arranged meeting and bring his whole family (aka his really hot son) on festive zoo trip.
After a long day of Christmas shopping and latte-imbibing, we waited with baited breath at the zoo entrance. Jim had arranged to drive up to the main entrance to pick up the iPad, and said he would be in his silver Audi (of course). I still held on to the wild hope that his son would want to come along for the ride to meet the strange girls who'd worked to return his electronic device.
The silver Audi approached, and the face from the pictures leaned out of the window. We waved him down, approached the car, and handed over the iPad (observing that, unfortunately, he was alone). He wished us a Merry Christmas and handed us a sealed envelope containing a twenty dollar bill, a candy cane, and a thank-you note.
No grand gesture of letting us keep the iPad or offering to let us accompany him on his next Parisian trip... No hot son to ogle at and tease that I'd seen a rather revealing picture of his eight-year-old bottoks on the slideshow... Just a warm fuzzy that we'd done the right thing, and a small cash reward.
As with everything in life, I laughed and got excited that I'd have a weird story to tell.
