I average three separate exits from my house every morning. I forget (in descending order of frequency) my phone, my sunglasses, papers or books I need, my wallet and (last week) my keys.
A week ago, Grey Powell, a 27-year-old software engineer at Apple Inc., left his mobile phone in a restaurant in Redwood City, Calif., after drinking an unspecified quantity of German beer. Alas, the phone happened to be a prototype of Apple's next iPhone, due in a few months. Mr. Powell's life is now a freaking hell show.
The stranger who found the phone took it home, tried to use it, realized it was new jazz and promptly sold it, for five grand, to Gizmodo. Gizmodo is a technology blog owned by Gawker, Nick Denton's online-gossip empire. Gizmodo then published pictures and details of the new gadget. The website, which normally attracts up to 50,000 visitors a day, has had eight million in a week.
All this because someone forgets his phone in a bar. But a phone isn't just a phone now, right? It's a form of public brain. Of course it's possible - this is the way things are these days - that the entire episode is a viral-marketing campaign dreamed up by Apple.
Bloggers were so busy breathlessly updating every blip in the story, it was easy to think something significant had happened - like, oh, I don't know, that the new iPhone was revealed to be radically different from the old iPhone. It isn't.
The victim, if there was one, was not Apple, but Mr. Powell. Since his photograph appeared online with him fingering an empty glass of beer, he has retreated behind his Facebook page and dropped his LinkedIn account.
Gizmodo's editor, Brian Lam, the man who decided to out Mr. Powell's carelessness, later implored Apple not to be too hard on him. At the same time, he tried to mollify Mr. Powell in a series of e-mails (posted on Edible Apple, the gossip website where I read them) that are as sanctimonious as they are unctuous and obsequious:
Hey man ... We had mixed feelings about writing the story of how you lost the prototype, but the story is fascinating. And tragic, which makes it human. And our sin is that we cannot resist a good story. Especially one that is human, and not merely about a gadget - that's something that rarely comes out of Apple any more.
Tragic? Because he left his phone in a bar? And therefore human? Thank God technology writers don't write about "feelings" more often.
Personally I am willing to excuse young Mr. Powell's behaviour on the grounds that he had been drinking German beer. As one of the characters in Philip Kerr's novel The One from the Other points out, "Only a country like Germany could have produced a beer strong enough to make a monk risk the wrath of the Roman Catholic Church by nailing 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg. If you ask me, the whole Reformation can be blamed on strong beer."
Protestant countries tend to be beer-drinking lands. Whereas "wine is a perfect Catholic drink. It makes people sleepy and complicit."
But I digress. I mention all this only to demonstrate the extent of the fallout that can follow the loss of one's personal digital belongings. The good news is that very few online commenters agree with what Gizmodo did. A majority say the decent course would have been to turn the phone in to the bar, which Mr. Powell had been frantically phoning.
Not that forgetfulness has to be digital to be scandalous. Maxime Bernier, now a denier of global warming, was minister of foreign affairs when he left top secret NATO papers in the house of his girlfriend, Julie Couillard - she of the heaving public breast and biker-gang pals. Mr. Bernier claimed he had no idea how the pesky documents got out of his briefcase. Ms. Couillard cleared that up: He left them out, and asked her to "put all this in the garbage for me." But imagine if that data had been in electronic form.
After Mr. Bernier came Lisa Raitt, then federal natural resources minister, whose secret papers on our nuclear industry were left behind in a CTV news studio. Jasmine MacDonnell, the minister's director of communications, lost her job, but seems to have been forgetful in general: Shortly after Ms. Raitt gassed her, Ms. MacDonnell lost a tape recorder that a journalist found. The tape revealed Ms. Raitt slagging the competence of Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq.
Beset by digital distractions, everyone's mind is a sieve these days. This makes me feel slightly better. Nick Clegg, the suddenly sexy leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats, left his notes in a taxi this week. Bono, the lead singer of U2, lost the lyrics to an unproduced album when he misplaced his laptop.
He wasn't the only one. A 2008 study discovered that 12,000 laptops are lost and left behind in U.S. airports every week. But 70 per cent of them go unclaimed. Why is that latter number so high - if in fact, as the information industry instructs us incessantly, digitized "information" is so all-important? Because - this is my guess - in our hearts, it isn't.