please send me a phone

My phone was stolen last week. It was sitting on a table near the door of the cool cafe near the apartment, and I was sitting facing the door. These three scruffy ruffians came waltzing in brandishing various papers, and explaining how they were in the military or I don't know what. Marguerite was sitting next to me and didn't understand a thing. The guys walked to where I was sitting, pointed vigorously at the papers, which were oh-so-strategically placed directly over my phone (unbeknownst to me). After a few more seconds of gibberish they walked out and disappeared. I of course didn't notice anything wrong until like an hour later, and then I was just happy that they hadn't taken off with my computer, which was also sitting on the table.

The phone thing is more of an inconvenience than anything else, I lost a few phone numbers and reminders of stuff I had to do, but the worst part of the whole fiasco is that the guys almost got caught. An hour or two after their daring escape they walked by on the other side of the street, and the girls at the cafe called the police. Olivier went walking after them and told a guard with a big, nasty gun what had happened. The security dudes at the apartment complex eventually got them and took them to the cafe to see if anyone could identify them.

At this point you're probably thinking I skipped over and took my phone back, carefully punching each of the guys in the head in my typical vigilante style. Unfortnately, this is not what happened. They ended up taking them to the bakery across the street, not the cafe I was sitting in, and since no one at the bakery had had their phone stolen by these bastards they let them go.

Thus I have now been without an alarm clock for nearly a week. Normally this would be a time for rejoicing but today I almost didn't finish preparing my class because I woke up too late. But of course, when I got to school I found out there was a semi-mandatory conference by some Columbia University professor at the same time and half my students weren't in class. I needed a coffee and something to eat, and since people weren't coming anyway I ajourned the class to the sunny cafe-terrace on the roof of the library. There my students got to enjoy a lovely view of the city, and me struggling in their language. I'm sure I lost all credibility this morning.

But as they say, oh well.