Like Finding a Smartphone in a Haystack

Every fall, my wife and I take our son to the local fall festivals to celebrate the harvest, to bask in beautiful autumn colors, and to enjoy some good ol’ country fun.

We visit this charming place called Butler’s Orchard, a 60-year-old family-owned farm in Germantown, Maryland, whose annual “Pumpkin Festival” offers Pick-Your-Own-Pumpkin fields, hayrides, potato sack slides, corn mazes, animals, rubber ducky derby races, rope spider webs, hayloft barns, playgrounds, learning stations, corn box, corn hole, pedal tractors, apple cider, pumpkin pie, and my absolute favorite, the “punkin chunkin'” cannon. […Trust me. Google it.]

Each year, thousands of DC and Baltimore area city slickers and suburbanites flock to Butler’s Orchard to enjoy some fall fun.

In years past, we’ve attended this event before Halloween, and the place has usually been packed.

This year, we decided to attend the Pumpkin Festival after Halloween.

Since it was so late in the season, our Pumpkin Festival experience was much more peaceful and serene than years past, and they were literally giving pumpkins away…Just take a short hayride to the pumpkin patch, pick all of the pumpkins you can carry, and they’re all yours!

The hayride gatekeeper, an old farmer named Bill, had a quiet and wise demeanor about him, and he seemed to be enjoying the less hurried post-Halloween pace of operation just as much as we were.

They only had two tractors running hayrides that day. To ensure that tractors like this are in good working condition, sometimes parts needed to be replaced and they can conveniently be found and availed online from the number one source for compact tractor parts and foreign tractor parts.

Bill told us that usually they have about 10 tractors in rotation during the peak season, which made a lot of sense to us. In years past, I remember waiting for 30-minutes up to an hour amidst snaked lines of impatient parents pushing strollers, checking smartphones, and managing families, all while rambunctious children clamored for their chance to roll around in a tractor-pulled chariot of hay to the pumpkin promised land.

This year was awesome. There was no waiting in long lines for hayrides. We just walked straight to the front, took in the scenery for a bit, talked with old man Bill for a few moments, then it was time to ride.

While riding in the hay wagon down rocky farm roads, through orchards and fruit and vegetable fields rich with fall harvest color, I laughed silently at the direct juxtaposition of a fast-paced mobile digital world upon the simplicity of country living. Such farms probably need equipment, like john deere bunker rakes, in order to be well-maintained and to look spotless.

I found it a tad funny, if not a bit bittersweet, to witness young’uns running wild and free in cornfields and pumpkin patches, laughing and tumbling around hay stacks as their parents fumbled frantically around mobile touchscreen interfaces in a futile attempt to photo-document every angle of their children’s carefree cheer.

Given the ubiquity of mobile technology, I suppose one would generally expect that most folks would be carrying smartphones these days, even around these parts. But, iPads? WTF?

What use does a digital tablet have on a hayride? I mean, I know the camera technology and internet connectivity on those things is pretty phenomenal, but, REALLY!? An iPad on a hayride? What’s next…MacBook Pros?!

Gee, at least we had the good sense to leave the iPad in the car. My son would naturally want to celebrate his picks of the harvest at the end of the day with a little Angry Birds, Super Monkey Ball, or Bad Piggies. But, bringing the iPad on the farm? NEVER! NO WAY! It defeats the whole purpose of a fall festival. Right?

That said, I did have my iPhone 5 with me. And, why not? It goes wherever I go. It’s literally attached at my hip most of the time, including on hayrides, and despite all the hypocritical snobbery that I have offered above, I ACTUALLY USED THE DAMN THING!

As the tractor pulled the hay wagon full of us metropolitan technophiles around the bend, past the pond, and up the hill toward the pumpkin patches, I witnessed an autumn landscape so spectacular that it literally begged me to capture its sun-kissed earth-toned bounty.

It was truly magnificent. I had to capture it. It was truly #nofilter hashtag-worthy, but before this hit my social networks, I’d inevitably want to spruce up its natural beauty with a few Instagram filters. Hey, why not?

So, I plucked my iPhone out of my pants pocket and snapped the most beautiful shots of pumpkin patches, children, haystacks and fall scenery that the world had seen since last weekend. I couldn’t wait to Instagram them, tweet them out, and share with my friends on Facebook.

The hayride ended at the pumpkin patch. We found three great pumpkins in excellent shape that would presumably never see their way to a glorious pie, a hearty bread, a kitchen, nor even the inside of an actual house.

These pumpkins would be purely decorative, and would sit on our front porch indefinitely, merely for our aesthetic enjoyment during the Thanksgiving season…Nothing more, nothing less. But, hey, pumpkin pickin’ is fun!

As the sun set upon the Pumpkin Festival, we returned to the hayride, each of us with one trophy pumpkin, and deemed the hayride back to the main festival grounds a perfectly relaxing ending to a fabulous fall day.

The tractor drove slowly past even more breathtaking farmland, which of course begged to be digitally immortalized by yours truly. I snapped a few more shots and figured that technology had already invaded this country paradise enough for today, so I proudly tucked the iPhone back into my pants pocket, silently radiating pride over my newest photographic accomplishments.

The hayride arrived back at the festival grounds. We pried ourselves out of the cushy hay piles, collected our prized pumpkins and climbed out of the hay wagon.

We thanked Bill, waved goodbye, wished him well, and headed back to the car. We loaded the pumpkins into the car and got ready to transport my son to his weekend occupational therapy session.

I reached for the car keys and plucked them out of my pocket. “Okay! All in, everybody! Ready to go!”

But, wait.

…

“F_ck!”

My phone was gone.

I gave myself several TSA-style patdowns, just to make sure.

Nothing.

My spouse asks, “Do you know where you last had it?”

“I just had it! I took pictures on the hayride back. Crap! It must have slipped out of my pocket.”

The adrenaline rush and panic that ensued was less a function of my fear of data loss and security breaches of my private emails, photo galleries, browsing history, personal contacts, phone records, voice memos, personal notes, explicit texts, and various other “unmentionables”. Rest assured, most of my important data was backed up in “the cloud”. Plus, through my other devices, if worst came to worst, I could easily erase that smartphone of any trace of personal data. I could deactivate that sucker, rendering it useless to anyone who’d hijack it.

This wasn’t about data. This was about MONEY.

I’d be damned if $400 of my hard-earned money was gonna go toward a replacement iPhone mere months after I’d just purchased the thing. It was brand new!

Butler’s Orchard – #FarmersWithSmartPhones // …oh, the irony.

I balked at my own clumsiness. How stupid, that I would have to pay twice retail price for this device, all because I wanted to share a small moment of Instagram glory with my alleged “friends” on Facebook and my various audiences on the interwebz! What a hefty price to pay for narcissism, huh?!

At that moment, I realized that this was actually about even more than money. It was about hypocrisy. It was about my haughty condescension, about my disgusting judgment of others. For as much as I silently scorned my fellow suburbanites for using their iPads on a hayride, and for as much as I pontificated on the humorous, near inescapable juxtapositions of digital technologies upon a rural world, I had become a victim of my own snobbery in the most embarrassing way.

I had lost. Literally. I had become “that guy”, and I had to pay the price for my erroneous ways. Shameful.

“I can’t believe I lost my phone! It could be anywhere!”

Quickly suppressing the loathsome and pitiful reflections upon myself, I had to find my iPhone…and QUICK! The festival hours were quickly coming to a close, and my son had a therapy session to attend that evening.

On the horizon, a sunset that I had earlier beheld for its golden beauty and grandeur was now haunting me with Earth’s every degree of planetary rotation. Minute after minute, darker, ever darker, an iPhone harder and harder to find amidst the majestic Butler Family orchards.

I was convinced it had to be in one of those hayrides. Luckily, as Bill the gatekeeper had told us, there were only two tractors [not ten] in rotation that day, so I humbly counted my small blessings and rekindled some hope of reunification with my gadgetry.

“BILL! Hey, excuse me, sir! I think I lost my phone on one of those hayrides! Do you remember which tractor I got off of?!”

“Nope.” he responded kindly, in a patient and understanding tone. “But, you’re welcome to stand in line, and we can look for it when the tractors come back around.”

So, we waited.

Tractor #1 arrived a few minutes later, full of happy families enjoying their prized picks of the pumpkin harvest, some of them routinely checking their smartphones and taking them for granted, completely oblivious to my obvious anguish, as if to deliberately mock my material losses for the day.

Bill opened the gate and gestured toward the tractor, “Have at it, my friend!”

I climbed into the hay wagon with my son and spouse, close to the position where I once sat [assuming, of course, that this was even the correct hay wagon]. We all started tossing fistfuls of hay right and left in a hopeless attempt to find my iPhone in the proverbial “haystack”, and I quickly realized how impossible this mission was going to be, as other families grew visually impatient awaiting their trip to the pumpkin patch.

So, we gave up on Tractor #1.

Damn.

Moments later, Tractor #2 arrived with more happy families. This time, we had the good sense enough to attempt to call my mobile number from my wife’s iPhone, in an attempt to actually hear ringtones emanating from the lost treasure. Fistfuls of hay were thrown by all in a futile attempt to hear a phone, most likely kept on “vibrate” by its introvert owner. We repeated the hopelessness of hearing vibrations of a “silenced” iPhone over the loud rumble of tractor engines and frolicking children. Even if the iPhone was vibrating on this tractor, it’d be near impossible to hear.

So, we gave up on Tractor #2, and for the most part, we gave up on any prospect of finding my iPhone.

I lost faith, sighed deeply, and conceded to being $400 poorer.

Oh well.

The sun inched closer and closer to the horizon, so gracefully stripping all rays of hope from my already darkened day, we proceeded to leave the farm and cut our losses, as shame slowly yielded to detachment and acceptance.

All of a sudden, a thought.

“WAIT! Hey, give me your iPhone!” I beckoned to my wife. “There’s an app for this!”

She handed me her iPhone, whose battery charge was dwindling around 10%, so I immediately sprang to action. I loaded up the App Store, searched for “Find My iPhone” and found an app for that, and I downloaded it with the quickness, over a surprisingly decent 4G connection. Sweet!

Bill looked at us and chuckled wisely, “You have a GPS locator app for that?”

I responded, “Hehe…Yup. If we’re gonna find an iPhone in a haystack, this is our only hope.”

If we were going to find a smartphone in a haystack, we had to send a loud piercing signal to the thing — something loud and sharp enough to cut through the loud low rumble of the tractor engine.

I loaded the app and quickly detected my iPhone via GPS location. As suspected, it was somewhere on the farm, which came as no surprise. It was clearly on one of those tractors. We sent a alarm signal to it to “Play Sound”. We heard nothing. We sent another alarm signal…Nothing.

Another signal. Nothing. Another one. Nothing.

Tractor #1 arrived again. More pumpkins. More happy families. More hay tossed. More alarm signals sent to the iPhone. Nothing.

We gave up again on Tractor #1.

Damn. Back to the waiting game as the sun set, degree by degree, darker, ever darker, diminishing all hope.

I said, depressed, “Okay, I suppose this last tractor is our only hope, y’all.”

Tractor #2 arrived again. More pumpkins. More happy families. More signals sent as we climbed into the hay wagon.

“Ding-ding-ding-ding! … Ding-ding-ding-ding!” we heard faintly amidst tractor rumbles and festival cheer.“Ding-ding-ding-ding! … Ding-ding-ding-ding!”

“I HEAR IT!!!” I shouted with an ecstatic feeling of relief and disbelief. “It’s here! Oh my god, I can’t believe it!”