If anybody has had a run of bad luck lately, it’s my oldest son John, and this week his losing streak was rolling right along.
When I got home from work Wednesday evening, Mary Ann was in the back yard. She was a little down, and told me it was because John’s iPad was lost.
An iPad, for the uninitiated, is a portable Apple device, probably less than half the size of a laptop computer that many of us use. From childhood, John has always loved new things, and he has loaded up on Apple technology since he was a teenager.
A lost computer was not a surprise. John has had a tough time since he quit his banking job in Houston in January 2024 to chase his dream of being an airline pilot.
Learning to fly is an expensive gig that has drained his savings, to the point that he recently took a part-time job at the Wal-Mart in McComb. He works evenings and seems to enjoy it, and he needs the money. His parents are very grateful that the store hired him.
John has about six different piloting licenses. The most important one, which he got this summer at an airport in Ohio (a long story), qualifies him to be paid to pilot other people, which means he can give flight instruction lessons.
Of course, right when he got that license, the bottom dropped out of the piloting market. For whatever reasons, maybe because it’s so expensive, fewer people are taking flight lessons. So for now, John’s licenses aren’t helping him make a little money or get the flight time he needs so he can be considered down the road for a pilot job.
He’s been living with us since January, and we have all realized that it’s just going to take time for this pilot thing to get off the ground, if you will. Mom and Dad see where he’s going, and we know he’ll get there, but it’s much more difficult than we could have known. Trust me, if you want to upend your life, quit your job and take flying lessons.
With that background, the disappearance of an iPad was just one more thing that went wrong. Mary Ann and John had taken his dog C.J. for a grooming, and drove up to downtown Brookhaven for lunch while waiting.
The iPad apparently was in the passenger door slot. It might have fallen out unnoticed when John got in or out of Mary Ann’s car. She thought she might have forgotten to lock the doors, and someone stole it.
Either way, it was gone. But Apple devices, when lost, can be remotely locked by their user. John did that, making it inaccessible to anyone else. Locked devices also connect with other Apples to give their location, and on Wednesday night, John said the iPad was in Bogue Chitto.
This is where the bad luck turned around.
On Thursday morning, he called the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department, which referred him to the Brookhaven police, since that’s where the device “went missing.”
The police said he had to come in to file a report. John drove up to Brookhaven.
Late Thursday morning, John called me, which he rarely does. But he had good news. Brookhaven sent an officer to the iPad’s location. Whoever had it said they found it by the railroad tracks downtown. They gave it to the officer, who was on his way back to the station with it.
For once, a happy ending. For once, a little good luck. It’s about time!
I’m writing about this partly because some friends have asked me for a John update, and this is a good way to sneak it into the paper. But mainly, I’m writing because I know that a missing iPad has to rank awfully low on any police department’s list of cases. Yet these officers were willing to help a guy from out of town recover his property. Mary Ann and I really appreciate what the Brookhaven police did.
I believe most police departments and sheriff’s departments around here would have done the same thing. They rarely get praised for the little things they do, like retrieving iPads, and this is one way to thank them for their work.
