Sleuthing an Old Phone

2023-08-29

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I've owned and used nine different mobile phones in my life so far. I remember every one of them too; I even maintain a list of them here on my capsule. That list contains some supplementary information as well, specifically when I began using each phone, when I stopped using them, and what carrier I used them with. I was able to find date information well after the fact by using various clues, such as when a photo was taken with the device.

That supplementary list, however, is incomplete. There is one phone I owned for which I don't have a started-using date--indeed, I have very little evidence that I ever owned it at all. That phone is the second phone I owned: the LG CU515.

The CU515 was a major upgrade from the Nokia 6030 I started out with. It was my first flip phone; it had a camera; it had expandable storage; it could set custom ringtones and SMS tones. everyone in my family had owned a camera flip phone by then except me, and I was thrilled to join the camera phone club.

I know when I stopped using the CU515. I went to an amusement park in June of 2009, and to keep the phone and my MP3 player from getting wet, I put both in a plastic zip bag. The bag fell out of my pocket while I was sitting on a wall waiting for some friends to get off a ride, and by the time I realized the bag was gone and went back to look for it, someone had already found the bag and walked away with it. It was never turned in to lost and found, and I never saw either device again.

My other phones all had some kind of clue as to when I first got them. My family has a picture of me receiving my first phone as a Christmas present; all my other phones have been positively identified by either a photo I took the day they were swapped, a text message sent about the phones, or simply because I remember the date. But this CU515 has no such record. I have no surviving SMS messages or photos from the phone, I cannot find any photos of me with the device, and I have not found any old posts or journal entries referencing me getting a new phone.

On my capsule, I list the started-using date of the device as sometime in 2008. This is purely a guess, based on the assumption that I used the CU515 for a similar length of time as I did the 6030. That assumption puts the date sometime in the first half of 2008, making me wonder if it was a birthday present. That assumption could be completely wrong--I simply don't know.

It's become quite fun to follow potential leads to find the date. The task is a form of digital sleuthing, an exercise in forensics: looking for clues that might tell me some information about a phone I don't have access to. This isn't the first time I've engages in such an exercise, but this is definitely the longest-running minor mystery I've faced about my own life so far.

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[Last updated: 2023-08-29]