I know, I know! I’m the worst! But being single in a digital age means that I’m spending my life swiping. And because of the app culture, I’ll match with someone and we’ll text for a few days before forgetting all about each other when someone more interesting comes along. I’d apologize, but I also know that literally everyone else out there is doing the same thing! We’re all terrible people with dozens of extra numbers in our phone that we completely lose track of.

So there I was, minding my own business, when the sky opened up out of nowhere. It was raining cats and dogs and I was blocks away from my car. I mean, it was summer, not spring, I wasn’t expecting to get drenched! I was wearing my flipflops and this crazy stream of water was against the curb that I needed to cross. It was too wide for me to jump over, so my sandal got caught in the flash river. Can you believe it? I chased after it, but as I grabbed it I tripped! Obviously, I was soaked, but my phone was even worse. It was in my pocket, so I landed on it in the water and it got drenched AND smashed by the concrete. Talk about the worst luck! Thankfully my credit card company has one of those weird perks where if you pay your bill through them, they’ll give you insurance and replace your phone for you. So at least that worked out in my favor.

What didn’t work out in my favor? Some tech glitch with my accounts so NONE of my contacts transferred! I didn’t have any messages, any phone history, let alone any names! When my own mother called me I screened it and had to use Absolute People Search so that I knew it was a real person and not a robocall spoofing my home town’s area code! It took me weeks to get most of communication back on track. But as for that nonsense I was just talking about – do you have any idea how awkward it is to get a super flirty text and have no idea who it belongs to?

Thank GOD I live in a huge city where everyone moved here from somewhere else! I’d get an unknown number pop up in my notifications and with a quick few taps be on reverse phone lookup to get all the information I needed. Even if someone kept a low profile, with the government and commercial databases I could at the very least figure out what state someone was from and help me narrow down which date I’d been talking to! Most of the time though, I’d be able to find out everything from their previous addresses to their email and any associated numbers. Since I’m known to be a quick responder when it comes to texting, it was incredibly useful to be able to point, click, and know with pinpoint accuracy in seconds what that mysterious number was! I could reply almost in real time and quickly save their number again! Thanks to reverse phone lookup I’m not the flake who ghosts her dates!