Sunday, July 20, 2014

13 July 2014



After a furious couple of weeks, we decided to stay home today.  It was a good idea because we needed to sleep in a little bit and we needed to get things done.  I had a long list I’d made of things to do and after a quick breakfast, I got right to it.

For whatever reason, it seems like I always need things washed.  Meg needed to do a full load, so I snuck in a few of my things and off she went.  We do that…when I did laundry earlier last week, she added a few things to my load.  The challenge is always making sure that we have enough coins between us to get things done, ha!

Then I opened my emails.  Started with my personal one and most of it was spam.  Kind of depressing.  Hadn’t heard from Katie, so I sent another email to her and one to Eric and John to make sure they’d had a Katie-Wright-Sighting recently.  They had.

At last it was time to open my work emails.  I was dreading this because I knew that I was going to have over a hundred new emails to answers/look at/deal with.  I wasn’t disappointed.  So I got to them and although it took me several hours, I managed to get through them. A goal Meg and I had for today was to start grading.  That didn’t happen for me, although Meg managed to grade a few things then decided there were other things she needed to do!  

I also got caught up on the receipts.  This year I’m using an Excel spreadsheet from the Travel Office.  They are using it as a means to try out something new and I offered to be a guinea pig.  I like it, but needed to take it and make it my own, which I did.  The good news is that I am on point.  There were a few things that I had not added, so when the total showed I owed Global Ed money (in the hundreds), I panicked!  Then, found it and was very relieved!!

Went back to answer a few more emails and then Meg and I got ready to go to dinner.  I wanted to take her to the place where we’re having our farewell dinner, since it’s my favorite place in Milan.  It’s only three metro stops, so off we went.  We had been chatting about a feature on Google maps where you can take pictures of where you want to be when you’re online/have data.  We decided to try that.  It works if you don’t have data, so we were intrigued.

We got off the metro and I knew where we were going, but we wanted to look at the map to see how it would work.  Meg was standing on my right side and I had my phone in my left hand and we were pretty happy because I could pull it up and it showed us where we needed to be.  Genius!  Then…..some horrible person on a bike rode by and snatched my cell phone (American one, not Italian one) out of my hand.  I screamed and people looked, but he was long gone by the time anyone could have done anything.  

We just stood there in stunned silence.  It was something that no one could have expected.  I wasn’t being wantonly careless with my phone, it was relatively close to my body (arm’s length so we could both see), it wasn’t hanging out and being tempting.  It was just one of those horrible things that happens and it’s over in a second.

I told Meg I wanted to go back to the dorms and then we spent time locking and erasing the phone’s data (I hope it works!!!) and going through and changing all my passwords.  I was still in shock!  I have a passcode on the screen and most of my apps didn’t have the passwords open. But, those that did, I immediately changed the passwords.

We have traveler’s insurance through the program, so I’ll contact them tomorrow to see what I need to do in order to file a claim.  This is just devastating because I feel so violated.  Meg and I were both replaying the situation in our minds wondering what we could have done to have made the situation different.  We just couldn’t think of anything.

The good news is that it wasn’t our purse with our credit cards or passport.  Neither one of us was injured.  A phone can be replaced.  BUT….it was a violation of my property being taken from me against my will.  That is what was so sad.  As long as he cannot get any information from the phone or SD card, then I’m fine.  Almost all of it is backed up online.  Just the sting of the theft remains.

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