Tuesday, March 15, 2016

5:40 a.m. Room 7, Tamariah Losmen

Siantar, Sumatra

I’m not in a good mood this morning. I barely slept. Every time I closed my eyes, I relived the moment when a thief grabbed my cell phone on my belt, ripped it off, and took off on his motorcycle. It was driving me crazy thinking about it—all the ways I could have prevented it from happening. So instead of closing my eyes, I turned on the light and started reading a book on my Kindle. I just wanted to do anything that would distract me from the awful day I’d had.

I’m probably being overly-dramatic. It’s not like I’m the first person in the world to have a smart phone stolen—and stolen in this abrupt and aggressive fashion. But it has bothered me in a very real way. I’m just sick of this country and these people and the conditions here. I’m sick of the constant cigarette smoke that comes in from everywhere and burns my eyes and scorches my throat. I’m sick of people constantly asking for money. I’m sick of the smells and the messes in the dirty bathrooms. I’m sick of the crazy people that approach me and yell about who knows what. I’m sick of being constantly on my guard, worried that people are going to steal something.

I’ve been reliving the events for many hours now, and I spent a long time on Skype talking with my brother and his wife about what happened. I also put up a few messages on Facebook about it. So I’m sick of it and don’t have much energy for retelling the story once more. But I’ll include the basics.

I went to the immigration office yesterday morning. It had been four full days since I handed in my application for a visa extension—four days of a vicious stomach illness. My life seems to consist of little more than trips to immigration and diarrhea. It’s not a great combination.

I rode my bike to immigration, and the woman at the counter recognized me right away and she dug out my red file. I handed her the receipt for my passport. I signed a ledger acknowledging receipt for same, and she gave me my passport with the 30-day extension in it. It allows me to stay in Indonesia until April 9. At this point, I don’t know if I have the energy or desire to remain even that long. I’m sick of the place.

I had my smart phone with me, and as I sometimes did, I had it in a pouch hooked on my belt. I rode along the busy street in a steady and slow climb. I don’t remember the exact details now, but I’m sure I stopped once or twice to look at Google Maps on my phone or to send a quick reply to a message. I was in the habit of doing that. I assume that that is when the thieves on their motorcycles made their plans. They likely saw me doing something on my phone and then saw me replace it in the pouch on my waist.

Then when I approached the intersection where Hypermart is located, I spotted a man on a motorcycle right behind my bicycle. I saw him in my rear view mirror. It was a bit unusual in that he was really close to me. But I didn’t think too much of it. People follow me all the time because they are curious. And men on motorcycles routinely pull up beside me and then engage me in conversation. They ask me the usual questions and then drive away. I thought that perhaps this guy was going to do the same thing. But he pulled up beside me, and then before I could react, he had grabbed my phone and ripped it free of my belt. He hit the accelerator on his bike, crossed over traffic to the other side, and drove away.

I’m sure there were a thousand things I could have and should have done. Suffice it to say that I did none of them. I was simply stunned. I did not even try to see his license plate. To be honest, it was likely impossible. The driver had crossed over into oncoming traffic and my view was blocked by lots of vehicles. I noticed that a second man on a motorcycle joined this guy. The two of them met up near the intersection, and they made some kind of exchange. I assume the guy who stole the phone gave it to the other guy. Then they rode away.

There was a bit of a traffic jam. I believe it was caused by the thieves on their motorcycles, but everything happened too fast for it to register. And I was busy pointing at the men and shouting things like “They stole my phone! They stole my phone! Stop them!” I was hoping for a miracle, that a group of men on equally nimble motorcycles would take off after these guys and hunt then down. I had no chance of catching them on my bicycles. Only another motorcycle could do it. But though there were people around, and some people had stopped on their motorcycles to look at me and see what was going on, no one reacted. I made eye contact with one man and pleaded my case. He just shrugged and drove on. He probably had no idea what had happened.

There was a car, I believe, stopped in front of a large truck with some other vehicles behind. I think they had all hit their brakes to avoid hitting the thieves on their motorcycles. The driver of the truck had gotten down out of the cab and was standing on the street, so something dramatic had occurred. I had crossed the street by this point on my bicycle with just the vaguest of ideas of catching these thieves. I knew I couldn’t catch them myself, but the idea was that if I was chasing them, the crowd of onlookers would get the idea and help me. I’d seen this in movies and on YouTube videos. However, real life doesn’t appear to work that way. People just stared at me.

I turned the corner on my bicycle, but the street was completely empty. There were no motorcycles anywhere in sight. Again, I was honestly expecting people to point in the direction of where the thieves had gone. Isn’t that what always happens? The hero chases the bad guys, and onlookers always point this or that way to indicate which alley the bad guys had ducked down. That also doesn’t seem to happen in real life. I saw two men in professional security guard uniforms right there. I pulled up to them all out of breath and panicked, and said something to them in English explaining that I had just been robbed and I asked them if they saw where the thieves went. They had no clue what I was talking about and just ignored me. Life is not like the movies.

I rode up the street for a while rather aimlessly. I knew there was no point to it. My brain was awash with crazy thoughts. And I was angry. And tired. And sad. And sick of this place. Sick of being here. I was so tired at the thought of everything that I would now have to do. I had just had the small triumph of getting my visa extension, and I had woken up feeling slightly better. I was able to make it all the way to immigration and back without needing to rush to a bathroom for a bout with diarrhea. And I was contemplating a relaxing day and then leaving on my bike for Lake Toba. Then all of that was gone in one brutal grab and wrench as I watched my precious phone disappear.

At that point, I could really have used an ally, someone to call the police, someone to sympathize, someone to do anything. As it happens, the theft had taken place right next to the Hypermart plaza where the English school was located. I’d gotten to know the young woman that worked at the front desk there. I wasn’t sure what she could do for me, but I thought she might be able to call the police or point me in the direction of the police. Unfortunately, I couldn’t even get her to understand that my phone had been stolen and that I wanted the police. From our meeting the other day, I thought her English was better than that. But it really wasn’t good, and she didn’t understand me at all. I ended up just cycling away.

The full scale of my loss was starting to hit me, as well as the full extent of my stupidity. When I bought the phone, I was aware that you are supposed to lock the screen with a PIN number. This capability was built into the phone. Everyone uses it. I intended to use it as well, but at the beginning, I was using the phone so often as I learned how to use it that the PIN number was a big hassle. So I turned it off. Plus, I bought a special case that automatically turns the phone off and on when you open the flip cover. So I kept postponing the day when I turned on the screen lock. And I never did. So the thief had total access to everything on my phone. And that meant total access to my entire life.

It was a terrifying thought. It’s one thing if you are in your home country living in your house or apartment and your phone is stolen. It’s quite another when you are in the middle of nowhere in a place like Sumatra. That phone was my lifeline to my entire life. With it gone and in the hands of a thief, I was in real trouble. I started to ponder all the worst-case scenarios and all the things that could happen. And, of course, I started kicking myself for my stupidity—for not turning on the lock screen, for having the phone in a pouch on my belt, for being so careless on the street. The thing is that I had gotten comfortable here. I didn’t feel threatened in Tanjungbalai, and I relaxed my guard. I knew that people in Asia lost their cell phones to snatch thieves all the time. Nearly every cyclist blog I see online has the story of them standing on the street somewhere in Asia and fiddling with their phone only to have it suddenly snatched away by a guy on a motorcycle. It’s standard. The wonder is not that my phone was stolen yesterday. The wonder is that it wasn’t stolen much earlier. I routinely ride my bike around with my phone on my hip. And I stop at the side of the road and take out the phone and stand there totally oblivious to the world around me and stare at my phone. You think you are safe because it is broad daylight and you are standing there in a big crowd of people and holding your phone. But if someone is tracking you on their motorcycle, it’s the most dangerous thing you can do. They drive by you a few times, circle around, plan their approach, and then they strike. Phone gone.

It felt absolutely lame to just give up and assume that my phone was gone. But there was nothing else to do. What else could I do? Ride my bike around the city for hours and just scout the streets? I wanted to go to the police, but more than that, I wanted to get to my computer and go online so I could change the passwords to all my online accounts. With that in mind, I rode back to my hotel at a steady pace. I arrived there sweaty and trembling and angry and barely thinking straight. I felt like every minute counted. I was terrified that I’d go online and find that the thieves had already changed the passwords on everything and locked me out of my own life.

Like an idiot, I started to open my computer in my room. Then it dawned on me: In order to access the Internet, I needed my phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot. My hotel has no Internet access! I was well and truly in the deep end. I quickly packed up my computer and all the things I thought I would need and I raced down the stairs and out in the street. My idea was to go to the Anda Hotel nearby and ask if I could use their Wi-Fi. I thought I would have to sit in one of the small chairs in the lobby and work there, but I got lucky and the very kind manager suggested that I just go up to their restaurant on the fourth floor. I could sit in comfort at a table, have a drink, and use their Wi-Fi there.

I got there and set up my computer and got to work as quickly as I could. But I soon found out that it wasn’t that easy. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was drenched in sweat. My hands were trembling. And I didn’t really know what to do. Even logging on to the hotel’s Wi-Fi was extremely complicated. It took me a long time to figure out how to do that. And then it was suddenly next to impossible to locate the “Change password” links on all my online accounts. The one for my Google Account was particularly difficult to find. I found myself staring at massive pages of Google information, and it seemed to tell me a billion things I didn’t need to know and hiding from me the thing I needed—how to change my password.

Back before my phone was stolen, I barely understood the complexities of how my Google Account, Microsoft Account, my computer, and my phone interrelated. They were all tightly woven together, but I didn’t really understand how. Now that I was trying to fix a problem, I was even more at a loss. I was a mess.

The good news—I think—was that the thieves were more concerned with the phone than with the access the phone gave them. In any event, I could still get into my various online accounts, and I started to go through them steadily one by one and change the passwords. It will come as no surprise to most people that there were far more accounts to deal with than was comfortable. There was no end to them, and my heart was racing as more and more accounts popped into my head that I needed to secure: PayPal, Ebay, Amazon, Hotmail, Gmail, Skype, and two dozen more. They were all connected and automated, and the thieves could probably go on a rampage if they were of a mind to do so.

I also tried to grapple with the mysteries of the Android Device Manager. I wasn’t fully aware of all this at the time, but I had looked into this before. And I knew there were ways to locate your phone remotely and do other things. I found the Android Device Manager and I sent a code to my phone to lock it and then later to erase all data. I have no idea if either code got through or did anything. I found, over time, bits of information that showed the journey my phone had taken after it was stolen. It traveled perhaps a kilometer and a half down the back roads of Siantar and then it stopped. I assume the thieves stopped there and disabled the phone’s tracking system and threw away the SIM card and did whatever else they were going to do. I have no idea.

I’m exhausted and annoyed just thinking about it. The complexities multiplied out of control as I tried to minimize the potential damage. I changed the password on my Microsoft account and Google account, but then these wouldn’t take effect until I shut down the computer and restarted. But I hardly dared do that. What if I was locked out at that point? So I raced through all the other password changes on all my social media accounts and everything else I could think of. Then when I did shut down and restart, my computer told me that the new password on my computer wouldn’t work because it was offline. But it seemed like a catch-22. I can only go online after turning on the computer. So how can the new password ever take hold? And then, of course, Microsoft chooses this most, most, most inconvenient of times to do one of its updates. I could not believe my eyes. Here I was fighting for my life, and I had to stare at the unmoving Windows Update screen reading 33% complete for what seemed like several lifetimes. The update would reach 100%, but, as everyone knows, that just means your computer is going to shut down and restart again. And again. And again. This went on for so long that I thought I was going to lose my mind. Of all the times to do the update, that’s when it happens.

I probably didn’t do half of the things I needed to do or could have done, but after about 2.5 hours, I packed up and went in search of a police station. I found a main station on Google Maps, and I rode my bike there in short order. It took some time to find an English speaker, but a young woman was produced. I believe she was a student intern, and she brought me into the area where I could report the theft. I was brought to a desk, and from that point I pretty much lost all control of the situation. I was told to report the theft to this woman sitting behind the desk at a computer. But she was eating a big bowl of noodles, and she pretty much ignored me. I don’t think she spoke English. A big, jovial man to her right chimed in with lots of laughter and sentences in Indonesian. I have no idea what he was saying. The noodle-slurping woman eventually pulled out a blank piece of scrap paper and asked for my passport. Details from my passport were written down at random. There was a lot of conversation going on around me, but none of it made any sense to me. No one seemed to grasp my story.

I had my computer with me, and I thought I could use it to show them where the theft took place and where my phone was last plotted. I thought this was a pretty important detail, and I was kind of hoping for a rush out the door and lots of flashing lights and guns drawn as they drove in their police cars to that intersection. But no one seemed to care about that. Even later when a man who spoke reasonable English took over the situation, I couldn’t get anyone to focus on the friendly blue dot on Google Maps where GPS was saying my phone was last seen. Chances were that my phone was no longer there, but who knows? Thieves aren’t known for being geniuses. Maybe the two thieves were sitting there at that blue dot chuckling over the fancy new phone they just stole. In any case, it seemed worth checking out. It wasn’t far away from the police station. But no one ever showed the slightest bit of interest in that information or going there. In a related note, they never showed any interest in knowing what type of phone had been stolen. My name and passport number had been noted. These documents were photocopied eventually, and I was interrogated somewhat harshly about why I was in Indonesia and why I was alone, etc. I could feel that I was slowly becoming the focus of their investigation. They seemed more interested in my personal details than in the details of the theft. Over and over, I told them that the phone was a Samsung Galaxy J7. I assumed someone would write this down. But they never did. You’d think that any hope of recovering my stolen phone would depend at least partially on knowing what kind of phone had been stolen. I’m no Sherlock Holmes but even I would start with finding out what had been stolen exactly.

It wasn’t all inactivity, I should say. In fact, there was a flurry of activity. The main officer asked if I was willing to go with them to the scene of the crime and show it to them. Of course I was willing, and a bunch of us piled into a police truck. I sat up front with the main officer, and a bunch of other officers climbed in the back. We raced off down the streets. This was more like it. We drove back to exactly where the theft occurred. We all got out of the truck and I walked the officers through the crime while they videotaped me. I thought that the police would at least talk to some of the men lounging at the stalls on that side of the street. Surely some of them had witnessed the crime? Heard about it? Anything? But that didn’t happen. After I’d shown them where the theft took place, we climbed back into the truck and headed back into town. I hinted that we weren’t far away from the blue dot on Google Maps showing the possible location of my phone, but no one wanted to go there for some reason.

The main officer was focused at the time in learning what my phone number was. He insisted that this was very important. I didn’t think it was at all. Every time you run out of credit in Indonesia, you buy a new SIM card. I end up with a new phone number every week. I don’t understand why they do it that way, but that’s what happens. The SIM card in my phone had been purchased just two days earlier, and at the time the phone was stolen, I’d almost used up all the credit and was already thinking about buying a new SIM card. The main officer insisted that they needed the phone number in order to find the phone. I didn’t agree with him. I told him that my phone was GPS enabled. It’s got GPS built right into it. The location system had nothing to do with the SIM card. And even if it did, I was pretty darn sure that the first thing the thieves did when they stopped at the side of road to gloat over their loot was remove the SIM card and grind it underfoot. I’ve seen enough Jason Bourne movies to know that you get rid of the SIM card right away after you do whatever nefarious thing you’re going to do.

But the main officer insisted, and we drove back to my hotel so that I could go to my room and retrieve the SIM card packaging with the phone number on it. My arrival at the hotel was a bit satisfying. I didn’t really expect going to the police to accomplish anything. I just thought it would be an interesting experience, and pulling up in front of my hotel in the company of a whole squad of police was very satisfying. The clerks at my hotel were dumfounded as they watched me come in with all the police right behind. Had I been arrested? Was I criminal? Had I brought the police to the hotel to complain about the hotel’s dirty bathrooms? They didn’t know. I hadn’t had the time to tell anyone my story yet.

Once I’d retrieved the SIM card packaging, we all piled into the police truck and went back to the police station. When we got there, we all went back to our usual places. All that was missing was the bowl of noodles. Nothing happened with the SIM card, of course. After a while, the main officer just handed the packaging back to me. He didn’t use it to do anything, so I’m not sure why he was so hellbent on my getting it. All this time, the main officer had been asking me about something else, and this was also very confusing to me. He kept saying that to find the phone, they needed the “email”. I had a lot of trouble making sense of that. I concluded that he meant that he needed access to my Google Account, which is connected to my Android phone, so that they can use the GPS tracker. So when we were at the police station, I fired up my laptop and I tried to open Google Maps to show them the information I had about my phone’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, despite a half dozen efforts, we couldn’t get the police station Wi-Fi to work. Then we used someone’s cell phone has a mobile hotspot, and that got me online. But again, no one was interested in the blue dot on Google Maps. It hadn’t moved, and Android Device Manager failed to connect with my phone.

I was also interested in getting my computer up and running just so that I could show these police officers proof that the phone existed. I was getting a definite vibe from them that they were starting to doubt my whole story. The main officer asked if I had the box that the phone came in. I said that I didn’t. He also asked for the receipt. I also couldn’t track that down. Then they wanted to know if I had the charger that came with the phone. And that, too, I couldn’t produce. I just use the same USB charger for all my devices rather than carry all the individual ones. The box and the packaging and the charger and everything else were all back in Kuala Lumpur in storage at the hostel. The police found all of this suspicious, and the focus seemed to go back again to my passport and my Indonesian visa and my unusual presence in Sumatra.

One good thing came out of all these exchanges. I learned that the main officer was not asking about my phone’s “email.” He was asking about the IMEI. I’d never heard of this before, but I’ve since learned that this stands for the International Mobile Equipment Identifier. It is essentially a unique identifying number assigned to every device, and it can be used in a number of ways. The main officer insisted that if they had the IMEI, they could use the police computers to find it. I doubted this, but I was willing to do what I could. Unfortunately, this IMEI was written on the phone, perhaps on the box, on the warranty card, perhaps on the receipt, perhaps on two or three other places—none of which I had. I thought desperately about how I could locate the IMEI. Surely, since the phone is so tightly wound up in my life, this information would be somewhere online. I wondered out loud if I could just go to Samsung’s website, look up my name, and find information there. Did I have a Samsung account? I knew I had a Dell account for my computer. I used it all the time for maintenance issues with my computer. Surely I had a Samsung Account. I didn’t remember setting one up, but maybe the company I bought it from had done so. It was worth a shot.

Then I ran into a host of other problems. These computer problems are so delicate for me, that I need peace and quiet and lots of time to work them through. Sitting in the middle of a police station with lots of chaos swirling around me and people talking to me and asking questions is not ideal. For example, every time I tried to go to Samsung’s website, I ended up on their Indonesian site, and it was all in Bahasa Indonesian. This happens automatically all the time, and it drives me insane. I’ve looked for years, but I’ve never found a setting where I can just tell my computer that I want everything in English. The stupid computer will sense what country it is physically located in and switch to that country’s language rather than use the language of the computer’s owner. And then when you end up on a foreign-language site, it is generally impossible to find the button that changes the language. Often there isn’t one. So I’m trying to log in to a Samsung Account that may or may not exist, and I can’t even read the screen and all the police are shouting in my ear, and it was just a giant mess. I eventually had to give up. The police also gave up. If I had no receipt, no serial number, and no IMEI, then there was nothing they could for me. I lamely offered up the suggestion that they could look for a Samsung Galaxy J7 in a very fancy case with a 64 GB SD card and a dozen other identifying characteristics, and they could start by looking on the street where Google Maps last saw my phone. But no one paid any attention to that suggestion. The main officer was clearly done with me. He stood up and rather ceremoniously said, “Because you do not have the IMEI, we cannot accept your police report.”

This statement was very telling. I was thinking in very physical terms of just finding my actual phone. Find the thieves. Find the phone. Return it to me. But the police were thinking in terms of appearances and paperwork. So there was a big flurry of activity surrounding the “investigation.” I was photographed dozens of times while I sat in the police station talking to the police. This was all proof that they were taking this crime against a foreign tourist seriously. Then we drove to the crime scene, and I was asked to reenact the crime while they videotaped it. Then we drove back to the police station for more photographs. The main officer assured me that every police officer in Siantar was busy looking for my phone, and he apologized many times that this happened to me in Indonesia. From my point of view, however, it seemed that every police officer in Siantar was either taking my picture or going over my passport with a fine-tooth comb. And once all of this was done for the sake of appearances, the verdict was rendered on the most important issue—the police report. And the verdict was that no such report could be made.

I didn’t really understand what that meant. Normal people probably have insurance and need a police report in order to file a claim. So a report is important. But I don’t have insurance and don’t need a police report. I also don’t care whether they have a file in their system with my name on it. I just wanted my phone back. And it was unclear to me whether their investigation depended on the report. If there was no report, does that mean no one would ever bother to even keep an eye out for my phone? Yet, they did ask me to write down my email address—in case they find my phone and needed to contact me. I wasn’t exactly reassured by this, because it’s not like I wrote my email address down in an official form. It was just on another scrap of paper, one that probably will get lost quickly.

There is a glimmer of good news here. After I left the police station, I returned to the Anda hotel to reconnect with their Wi-Fi and continue my damage control and my own investigation. I also did some research into this mysterious IMEI. I found out a lot more about it, and I kept trying to figure out a way to find it. I figured it had to be somewhere. I must have access to it. One thing I could do was ask the owner of the hostel in Kuala Lumpur to rummage through my stored bags, find the original box and locate the IMEI for me. I went so far as to write an email to the friendly owner of the hostel. I hated to bother him, but it seemed to be my only option. But then out of nowhere, I stumbled across my IMEI. I was looking for something else entirely. I wanted to go into my Google Account and track recent activity and see if the thieves had done anything I didn’t know about. It took me a while to figure this out, but I ended up at my Google Dashboard, and this gave a rundown of my entire Google life—a very scary thing. Partway down this long list, was a section for Android devices and my Samsung Galaxy J7 was listed there. I clicked on the down arrow, and there it was – the IMEI for my phone. It had been there all this time. You’d think that if the main police officer was such an expert in the world of the IMEI he’d have been able to tell me it was there. I quickly sent another email to the hostel canceling my request. I made a note of my IMEI, and now I have plans to return to the police station with the IMEI. I don’t think anything will result, but it will at least vindicate me to an extent. I’m not such a total loser after all. I have an IMEI.

An interesting note is that when I said goodbye to the police officers and stepped outside into their enclosed parking lot, a group of young men chatted me up. They wanted to hear about my experiences. I was happily chatting with them, but then a light bulb went off, and I realized that they were reporters of a sort, and they were asking me questions in case they wanted to write a story about it: Cell Phone Snatched from Canadian Tourist. They also tried to get me to say bad things about the police. I could have said lots of bad things, but I held my tongue.

I stayed at the Anda until very late at night. I kept working away at all the problems I faced because of the cell phone loss. I also called my brother and sister-in-law in Canada and had a nice long chat with them over Skype. It was weird to do all of this at the Anda hotel. It’s a very nice hotel and very modern. And the people that work there are extremely nice and efficient. The guests are rather rich and well-educated. I felt really good to be there. The Wi-Fi was strong and reliable. The bathrooms were super clean and nice. The staff knew about my problems, and they were very kind to me. They even brought me a free large cup of sweet tea and offered me some fried rice. My point is that I’m rather down on Indonesia and my experiences here. But you could argue that it is an experience of my own design. I’ve chosen to stay at the dirty and noisy Tamariah where no one speaks English and the guests are somewhat dirty and noisy and strange. I could have stayed at the Anda and had a wonderful experience. So I can’t blame Indonesia if I choose to put myself in uncomfortable situations.

My plan this morning (it’s now 7:40) is to return to the police station with the IMEI and see what happens. Then I’ll go back to the Anda and go back online to monitor what has happened. Hopefully nothing has happened.

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01