Colm O'Regan: I've lost my phone, loading up the new one feels like a fresh start

Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Pic: Denis Minihane.

It was bound to happen. I had gone public extolling the abilities of St Anthony in finding phones. 

So it was inevitable I should then lose my phone. Completely. Somewhere on a Dublin road, it fell out of my pocket while cycling. Hopefully driven over.

It was the second phone I’d lost in 24 years. 

The first phone I lost was in 1999. A Mitsubishi Trium. It had all the mod cons of the time - a flippy keypad guard thingy, and an aerial. It didn’t even have Snake.

Information-wise, losing a phone a quarter of a century ago was a big deal. I had about eleven phone numbers in it and most were O’Regans. 

And one girl who was obviously very busy, and hadn’t a chance to check her texts yet, so that’s why she didn’t reply.

Will I have lost forever some tender romantic texts from my wife? She’ll still have them anyway. Also, we are at the “can u get milk” stage of our sexting life.

But still, it’s the first time I’d lost a ‘smart’ device. 

For a while, I felt exposed. Somewhere on it is some record of my thumbprint. Or maybe just my DNA in general, from my sweaty palm or downy right ear. 

Like all the people who go onto these genealogy websites, hoping to be more interesting, unaware their whole genome has been sold to VaultTec.

In theory, could that allow me to be framed for murder in Tuscaloosa in the year 2034?

We have so much on them. Bank stuff. I wasn’t too worried about the banking apps. They barely let me in. They make all this fuss about two-factor authentication and then you’ll still get a text pretending to be from them that says something like 'Hey, we are your bank. Click this link. Why? Oh, no reason.'

Revolut was funny, when I put it onto the new phone, and it wanted a photo of me to verify I was, in fact, Me. 

'Hold the phone still,' it barked. 'Put your face inside the box.' I moved the phone to put my face inside the box. 'YOU MOVED YOUR PHONE'. We were like that for half an hour, barking at each other.

Loading up the new phone feels like a fresh start. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity to have fewer unused apps. I’ve lost all the versions of the taxi app that never turned up anyway, no matter how many different names it had.

Most of my phone numbers are gone, apart from a hundred or so who seem to have survived because I accidentally saved them somewhere in the cloud. 

They are a random bunch of characters now on my phone. Like a load of people who applied for Squid Game.

Slowly, I’m putting more people in. Retrieving numbers from WhatsApp groups. Being annoyed at people who don’t have their name on their WhatsApp profile, or their photo is their baby, or a blurry one from 100 yards away as they finished a triathlon. I am NOT interested in your charity exertions. I just want your number.

It’s all lost forever. Mashed into the ground. Unless it was spotted by the agents of the WEF, or whoever your aunt blames everything on in her Facebook posts about chemtrails. 

Shadowy figures who ran out onto the road, scooped up the hard drive, and are now compiling dossiers on Fifteen Electricians Who Never Called Me Back, and Adverts Barry who ghosted me on a deal for a free high chair.

But the only thing that I do miss? The dead. 

As we get older, our contact list gradually accrues those who have passed on and their last messages to us.

Thankfully I had that memory backed up already. In the soft drive in my head.