The good, the bad, and the lucky
Bad: I lost my work-supplied Blackberry a few days ago.
Good: I alerted the IS/IT folks, and they were able to remotely disable and reset it.
Unseemly: This remote reset, I learned today, didn’t clear emails or calendar entries already on the device.
Good: A good samaritan found the Blackberry and attempted to track down its owner.
Good (from an information security perspective): There was insufficient information on in the device to identify me or the company.
Bad (from an odds-I’d-ever-get-reunited-with-the-Blackberry perspective): There was insufficient information on the device to identify me or the company.
Good: The aforementioned good samaritan called the phone’s own number, in hopes that its voice mail greeting might identify an owner.
Bad: I’d never used that device as a phone. (I already had a personal cellphone that I liked, so I continued using it for voice after getting the Blackberry. The Blackberry served only as an email client.) I’d never set up a voice mail greeting.
Good: The phone number of the Blackberry was previously that of my former boss. The voice mail greeting for the phone number was still the one he’d created a couple of years prior, directing callers to his personal cellphone number. (He, too, liked to use a personal phone for voice and a company-supplied phone for work email.)
Bad: The aforementioned former boss had long since moved to the other side of the country to work at another company.
Good: Despite moving across the country, he’d kept the original phone number for his personal cellphone.
The net result of these many arbitrary decisions was that the person who found the Blackberry was able to track me down and return it.