An asshole stole my backpack in Berlin

Time for some real oversharing

A quiet joke of this newsletter is that despite being called Oversharing, I rarely share much about myself in it. You get my views on the gig economy and tech bros and other relevant things, which I hope is interesting but also think is useful for understanding the lens through which I report and write. I do my best to be fair, balanced, and open, but would never claim to be ‘neutral.’ The very idea of journalistic objectivity is a false premise; journalists are people too and all people have opinions, and what is deemed ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ in a newsroom all too often equates with a traditional white male view of the world. I would rather be upfront about my opinions than feign at objectivity. So I share those, and in general that’s about as personal as Oversharing gets.

This week, however, I’m going to do some bonafide oversharing. Because some asshole stole my backpack the other week in Berlin, and it sucked and now I’m turning it into content for this newsletter. (If you were thinking, hey Ali, you said we’d get weekly Other Stuff links, and then we didn’t get any links or posts for more than a week—yes, the backpack theft also disrupted my publishing schedule.)

Almost everyone I’ve told this story to has said something like “I’m so sorry that happened” followed by “when something like that happened to me…”. I’ve found this helpful because it shows that you can do your best to be cautious and alert and still a guy might come into a moderately nice Greek restaurant in Berlin early on a weekday evening, order a beer and casually place his winter jacket over the bag that is sitting right next to you and which you thought was safe, sip said beer, and wait until a moment when you’re distracted to lift his jacket and your backpack with it and walk out. It doesn’t happen to everyone all the time, but it seems to have happened to a lot of people at least once. It is not your fault, no matter what you might think, it is the fault of the asshole who stole your stuff.

Because I was in Berlin for a short work trip and traveling light, my backpack at the time had most of my important things in it: laptop, keys, phone, debit card, U.S. driver’s license, glasses, headphones, book (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong, I was really enjoying it and hope the thief at least learns something), umbrella, water bottle (😭 I loved my water bottle), hat that I knit (😭 I loved my hat and can’t find more yarn like it), and random other stuff. Pretty much the only important thing I brought on the trip but which wasn’t in my backpack at the time was, thank god, my passport, which was stashed safely at the Airbnb.

The restaurant called the police, who eventually came and took a report. While I will probably never see my things again, there was if nothing else an abundance of evidence in this petty crime case. The restaurant caught the theft on security footage, and the waiter saved what he believed to be the guy’s beer glass and handed it to the police, who took it with a gloved hand and placed it into an evidence bag. I was able to locate my laptop and phone serial and IMEI numbers that night, and the police took them down to enter into a stolen device database. A table of three very kind German guys who were sitting next to my friend and I spent the better part of their dinner translating between the restaurant staff and us (and were very excited when after an hour or so of waiting not one but three police showed up).

Having most of your important belongings stolen while traveling is obviously upsetting, but it also cast into very sharp relief how much of our lives is dependent on our personal devices. Right away I wanted to do several things: contact friends and family, shut off my debit card, log out of my email and secure accounts on all devices. But without my phone and computer, I couldn’t do any of that. The only number I knew by memory was my parents’ in the U.S. I knew the passwords for my email and Apple ID, but was unable to get past the two-factor authentication steps on my accounts without access to my phone number, email, authentication app, or any trusted devices. I desperately wanted to shut off my Monzo debit card, but the easiest way to do that is from the Monzo app on your phone or via an ‘emergency’ web portal that requires access to your email, both of which were nonstarters.

That was the night of. Over the next 48 hours as I made my way back to London, it became increasingly clear to me how much harder life is without a smartphone in your pocket and a reliable computer at your disposal. I learned, for instance, that there is only one terminal in all of London Heathrow Airport that lets you load money onto an Oyster transport card with cash rather than a payment card (it was not the one that I was in). We live in a frictionless digital world, but take away the digital access and that same world is suddenly full of friction.

Over the next several issues of Oversharing, I’m going to tell you what it was like living in that world for a few days. We’ll talk about the practical stuff (how I got back into all of my accounts and past the two-factor authentication thanks to a surprisingly resilient tech setup; how it’s good to have travel insurance; etc.), the glaring holes in digital services (I was truly shocked at the lack of non-digital emergency support offered by Monzo, a company I’ve previously had only positive experiences with), and the many little things that make life more difficult and time-consuming without consistent and reliable access to personal digital technology, what I’ve come to think of as a tax on the disconnected. I’m writing this now on an old iPad I borrowed from a friend, hooked up to an external keyboard with a dongle another friend ordered me from Amazon Prime. It works, but it’s a lot slower and more awkward than my laptop, and everything from adding links to editing takes much longer than it used to.

I don’t want to seem naive here: I’m a professional business and technology reporter and well aware of the digital divide. The gig economy is a perfect example of how personal technology gatekeeps access to digital services on both sides. Ordering an Uber is much easier if you have access to the app and a smartphone; driving for Uber is impossible if you don’t. I ran a terrific interview last summer with Julia Ticona, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, on how mobile phones rule the lives of contingent workers, the topic of her book Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age. I know all of this, but I never expected to be living it without warning. For the next week or so of Oversharing, I’m going to overshare about that.