So I find a mobile phone on a bench just outside the office.
The contact list says ‘Mama’ but she does not answer. ‘Papa’ gives no result either. ‘Casa Familia’ does not pick up. I call the last person in the list of received calls. A friend of the owner, it turns out.
I give my address so somebody can come and pick the thing up. The owner, L., works in the same building as me according to the friend. But it is her first day at her new job at the law firm and the friend does not yet have a landline number on which to inform L. Could I perhaps go up to the 6th floor?
On the 6th floor they do not know L. and no new person has come in that day. Other than that, I also did not use the official reception area of the company, based on the 7th floor. Am I aware of that? A few lawyers are staring at me.
In the official reception area on the 7th floor they do not know L. either. Maybe she lied to her friends telling them she was going to start work in a fancy firm while actually waiting tables in a bar next door?
I go back to my floor and send a message to L.’s friend, give my address again and ask to have somebody pick up the device.
Colleague C. –the one who describes himself as a traditional family man without wife but with dog- starts enquiring for the messages and the pictures on the phone. Can he please have a look? Could be fun, right? She has herself as a wallpaper, at a poolside and in bikini anyway, so what does it matter? He is sure she will not mind. Could he please please please have a look? I tell him to find a different hobby.
The battery is about to die, so I write down some telephone numbers from the contact list, just in case I will need to call the old fashioned way.
Two hours later the phone rings: it is L.’s mother. She is parking now.
I ask the girl at reception to send any person that comes in looking bewildered and trying to pronounce a foreign name in the oddest way (Jolín? Yuly? Ehmmm) directly to me.
Half an hour (!) later L.’s mother shows up. So extremely nice of me! The pains I have gone through! She has come directly from the airport to pick the telephone up! It is such a relief to see that people like me still exist! Her daughter just started work on the 3rd floor! Thank you so incredibly much! And off she goes.
Just a pity I will not be there when L. discovers that my colleagues and I managed to get seven faces in just one photo taken with a mobile found on a bench just outside the office.
Mydrid, my city 