by Peggy Robin
You know about Apple's "Find My...." tracking program? It's the greatest thing... up to a point. You can track your iPhone, your wallet, your keys, your luggage, anything you can tag with a tracking fob or a credit-sized card that works on the Apple "Find My..." system. There's also a comparable app for Android users.
I've been using it for a while, most often to get the "Find My" app to locate my misplaced iPhone. Every time I've done this, it shows me that the phone is somewhere in the house. Trouble is, it doesn't tell me which room. I live in a house with a basement, first and second floor, plus a finished attic, as well as front, back, and side yards where I've occasionally dropped my phone. (Tip: Do NOT put your phone in a shallow pocket while gardening. Or setting up a sprinkler!)
Recently, I was complaining* to my adult daughter about the limitations of the "Find My" system when it came to pinpointing where I left my phone, and she came up with an absolutely brilliant solution. I offer it to you, free of charge: She programmed my phone to initiate a series of steps whenever it receives this one-word text message: "findmyphone." My phone responds automatically to this text message by turning its volume all the way up and opening its music app, playing "Runaway" by Del Shannon. And it will keep playing it on a repeating loop, until I follow the sound to the location of the phone, open the app, and turn off the music....or until the battery runs out (if, for some unknown reason, I can't find it after hours of searching).
So now I use FindMy to be assured that the phone is in the house and so that I won't have to go turning things over in every room on every floor to track the thing down. Now I know, if I hear "Runaway" coming from the basement, the phone is probably at the bottom of the laundry basket, under all the dirty clothes. If the song is coming from my home office, I may find it on the floor under my desk, where it probably skidded out of sight, underneath the large, ergonomic footrest. If it's in the kitchen, it may have been closed between the pages of a looseleaf binder of recipes and then put back in the bookshelf of cookbooks. These are all real places where I've found my phone in the past, before the FindMy system was in use and my daughter created the program to make it sing to me.
