Bjørn Stabell 白熊

“Let’s head out for a coffee”, my girlfriend Ivana said, thereby setting in motion an incredibly journey on this, the first day of 2007.

As usual, we caught a cab outside of our apartment building, Heqiao, heading first to Pacific Coffee at Fortune Plaza. They were, as many other places on January 1st, not working today. We continued in the same taxi to our second most favorite coffee shop, Sculpting in Time out by Lidu.

Finally inside SiT, Ivana made a face of terror, “where’s my phone?!”. That would be her Sony Ericsson 810c which her company had finally, after 3 months of waiting, awarded her for coming up with the winning names for their conference rooms. She’d just gotten the phone two weeks ago and was deeply in love with it.

We had neither a fapiao, the driver’s number, nor the license plate number. About the only thing we remembered was that the cab was from a taxi company called 海-something, which means sea-something, and that it was white and green… or… wait, maybe it was green and yellow?

Heading back to Fortune Plaza we started going through our options. I’d lost my phone one month ago, stolen from my table while sitting at Starbucks. “Not much we can do”, I said. “We can just keep calling the phone like we do now, hoping he’ll pick up, and if he doesn’t, we give up and go to China Mobile to deactivate the subscription”.

The guards at Fortune Plaza hadn’t seen the phone, so it must’ve dropped out in the taxi. Great. “Let’s keep calling the phone for a while longer, give him a chance to pick up.” We did. We also sent a text message in Chinese promising a ransom if he returned the phone… although we’d much rather just kick the shit out of him if we saw him. He was probably thinking the same, thus not picking up or contacting us.

We must’ve called the phone 30 times, and we both knew there was no way he couldn’t have heard the ring-tone. He was definitely ignoring it, or had it turned to silent. Or maybe the next passenger had picked it up and was heading for the black market over at Xizhimen?

When I lost my phone one month ago I later regretted not trying to locate it using its bluetooth. If I could’ve established that the phone was within bluetooth range I could’ve just locked down the floor and ransacked the people there. Well, if they’d let me. In any case, I didn’t think of it. Any victim of theft would sympathize with the dream of catching the thief with his pants down, and subsequently kicking the shit out of him.

When I had lost my phone I had thought of using a service from China Mobile had called 位置服务 (location based service), which has options such as 你在哪里 (where are you) and 我在哪里 (where am I). To use the “where are you” feature the other phone must be configured to allow you to query its location, and mine didn’t have it enabled, but maybe… just maybe… I had turned it on on Ivana’s number when I was playing with it before?

I sent the message. After 10 painful seconds a message came back:

朝阳区东四环中路劲松桥附近

We knew where it was! Somewhere on east 4th ring road, nearby Jingsong bridge. Wow! But, what can could we do with this information?

We knew we’d better find the phone before it got switched off. We knew we could locate the phone by sending these SMS messages that sent us back the location, but how accurate were they? And how delayed was the information? And how would we know what to look for when we were in the general vicinity?

In any case, we set off in another cab. We made sure to select one that didn’t have any fence or anything to obstruct our view, so it took a while, but finally we found one from 北方 that matched our criteria. Our cabbie was the young sort, talking on a handsfree headset to his friends.

We slowly introduced our new cabbie to the game we were playing, called “catch the thief”. He seemed a bit uneasy at first, due to collegiate feelings about cabbies, but he slowly got into it. With Ivana’s memory of how the second character in the cab company name looked like, he helped us narrow down the cab company name to Hailuo (海螺, or hai3 luo2).

He also mentioned a GPS tracking center for cabs, and handed us a name card with some numbers.

On the way to Jingsong bridge we also checked a few other leads:

• We called the GPS center, explained the situation, and asked if they could find a Hailuo cab if we gave them an approximate location. They could, but wouldn’t to anyone but employees of Hailuo.

• We called Hailuo, explained the situation, and somehow managed to get them to call the GPS center to give us permission to check their cabs’ location. Hailuo didn’t seem very willing or knowledgeable, with temporary staff working during the holidays. Some good news was that they were a small company, with only about 100 cabs.

• We called the GPS center again, but they said there were too many cabs in that area.

• We called the building security in our apartment to see if they could identify the cab license plate, car model, or other. They could confirm that it was an Elantra.

We continued following the cab and feeding its location to the GPS tracking center. It had become pretty clear by its rapid movement that the phone was still in a car, and its erratic back-and-forth pattern indicated that it was probably still in the cab.

For a while we, and the cab, were stuck in the construction market at Shilihe. Once we thought we had found the cab, but it turned out to be the wrong model and wrong driver.

The Hailuo cab was now heading down south on third ring road, and we were only about 10 minutes behind it.

At 样桥 (yang2 qiao2) the cab seemed to be stuck. “Probably stuck in traffic”, our cabbie said. He thought the other cab must have turned around and was stuck trying to get back onto third ring; the entry was massively congested. There were hundreds of cabs in the traffic jam; no luck finding our cab in that pile.

Nearly two hours had passed since we started the chase, and it was starting to get dark. We were running out of time!

But then, the Hailuo cab moved further south, away from third ring. Great! That meant less populated areas, which again meant the GPS center would have easier time singling it out.

The Hailuo’s last known location was nearby a kindergarden. Our driver didn’t know where it was, but the GPS center directed us by looking at their map.

We continued south into Fengtai area. It was really starting to get dark when we came to a railroad crossing. We passed it, continuing south, on a muddy two-lane road.

“There!”, both Ivana and our cabbie screamed out. They’d spotted a Hailuo cab passing us, heading north. Our cabbie did a quick U-turn.

“Let’s get up close so we can get his license plate number!”, said the cabbie. He was really into it now, spending as much time as he could in the ongoing traffic lane while we were trying to make out and write down the license plate number.

Just knowing the cabbie’s license plate number wasn’t enough; he could easily claim he couldn’t hear the phone ringing, and someone else stole it later, and we’d have no proof. We had to catch him with his pants down; with the stolen goods still in his car.

With one car between as the Hailuo cab, heading north in the dusk on a muddy road, we hit the railroad tracks again. A train was approaching so the light was red. For a while I thought the Hailuo cab had managed to cross already, leaving us behind on the other side, but no… he was the first car waiting in line for the red light. This was our chance!

With heart beating fast and my phone in hand, ready to call Ivana’s number to expose the thief, I walked over and sat down in the passenger seat next to the driver.

“What are you doing here?!!?”, said the driver. He was obviously more terrified than me.

“I am your passenger from earlier today. You have my phone.”

“What? Where do you want to go?”, said the driver, pretending to not recognize the situation. I wasn’t 100% sure I’d gotten the right driver. I tried calling Ivana’s number but couldn’t hear any ringing.

The light was turning green, and he was stuck there, confused, then he started driving again. It struck me that this was a dangerous situation; sitting in a car with a thief like this, in the dark, on a desolate road south in Beijing. My only consolation was that Ivana and the other driver were in a cab behind us.

“I don’t want to go anywhere, just pull over. I just want my phone back,” I said, opening up his glove compartment to find it empty. “Where is it?”, I continued. I still couldn’t hear any ringing. Maybe I got the wrong cab?

The cabbie was very agitated. “It will not be lost!”, he said, shaking a finger at me. “Someone has it and will return it!”, he continued.

“Who has it, do you have it?”, I said. At least this confession made me sure I’d gotten the right driver.

“Someone has it. We have rules!”, he continued.

“Just give it to me now, or I’ll call the police”, I said.

We continued like this for a minute or so. Both of us were really worked up. He was clearly trying to avoid saying that he had it, while at the same time he couldn’t deny having seen me and knowing of the lost phone. He finally caved in.

He went out back, opened the trunk, and opened a little bag in the trunk. He reached in and pulled out a phone.

“See!”, he said, “it’s not lost!”. He was holding someone else’s Samsung phone in his hand.

“That’s not my phone!”, I said.

“Oh? … This then!”, he said, picking up the Sony Ericsson, shaking it, clearly very agitated. The kind of agitation you see in someone who really lost their face in China.

By that time Ivana and the cabbie had parked and left their car as well.

We took the phone, the thief-cabbie’s phone number, and headed back to Heqiao. The time was 17:30, four hours after we’d first sat in his cab. We reported the cab to his company, saying he also had another “lost” phone in his back and that they should make sure he returned it.

On the way back we discussed ethics amongst passengers and cabbies with our Beifang cab driver. He claimed in several years he’d only found a phone in his cab once. Most of the time he checks the back seat when passengers get off, so he can make sure people don’t lose anything. That makes good sense; I wish this was practiced by all drivers.

He also mentioned a story of a cabbie that had done the honest thing of returning a lost bag to the cab company’s lost+found department. When the passenger showed up his reaction was “where’s the RMB 20,000 I had in there?”. That cabbie swore to never return anything.

I’ve heard similar stories before where the moral is not to do the right thing as you’ll be framed, but I can’t help think they’re more of urban legends, excuses for people that want to do the wrong thing, and that we have to have a certain base trust in order for society to get better. I’m from Norway, and it’s by no means perfect, but the base trust is much higher, and it does mean you don’t have to worry about doing the right thing.

We also discussed lost+found policies of cab companies. Basically there are none. It’s up to the individual cabbie’s ethical standards. It would make sense to me that cab companies have strict policies on how to deal with this. In the case of phones cabbies should be required to answer the phone and get it back to its rightful owner; anything less should be considered theft. That said, the owner should express gratitude and pay a nominal ransom of, say, RMB 500. Our cabbie complained few passengers ever show any gratitude; they don’t want to lose face? In any case, it’s causing cabbies to not want to do the right thing, which is in no-ones interest.

When we got out of the cab at Heqiao we paid our cabbie an extra RMB 100 or so for his good help. It felt good; without him we wouldn’t have found the other cab. Also, we’d much rather pay him our “finders fee” than the other thief-cabbie.

Why didn’t we get a fapiao? Well, we will, in the future, every time we take a cab. But, even if we had, there’s no guarantees the cabbie wouldn’t claim the next passenger took the phone. It’s happened to me before.

So what if you’re that passenger that discovers a lost phone in the back-seat? I recommend you tell the cab driver and coordinate the return of the phone with the cab driver; don’t leave the cab until they’ve made contact. That way he’ll do the right thing, even if may not have done that on his own free will.

Finally, as we were tracking the cab in real time, supporting the taxi GPS tracking center, and having people analyze surveillance camera films for us, it struck me what a digital society we have become. When we as individuals can do this there’s no limits to what governments, police, or military can do, if they chose to… but we knew that. It did feel like something straight out of 24. What a start of 2007!

(Photos courtesy Snow Kisses Sky and Rupert Dyer.)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Exoweb, China, Lifehacking, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.