Lost Phone Saga

With my daughter recently having had a scalding accident, she and I have spent a couple of nights at Hutt Hospital (excellent service there!).  After we got home from the hospital, we discovered my wife had left her cellphone there.

At my urging, my wife rang Vodafone to request a bar be put on her phone so that it couldn't be used.  Unfortunately, it seemed that Vodafone were having system issues so we were redirected to the backup call centre in Egypt.  She explained the situation to the CSR, who was unable to put the bar on due to the issues.  My wife then asked for an assurance that we wouldn't be charged for calls made during the time that a bar was not on the phone.  The CSR stated that we would still be liable for any incurred charges.  My wife said that this shouldn't be the case, but the CSR started off on some sales script.  My wife interrupted to try to make her case and the CSR hung up on her!

(For me, this is the height of rudeness and is unforgivable.  I have actually raised this separately with people at Vodafone from my Twitter stream, and Vodafone in no way condones this behaviour.)

During this time, I had been trying to ring my wife's cellphone as we knew where it had been left.  About 15 minutes later, a woman rang our landline and said that her son had "found the phone".  As they weren't at the hospital any more, we have our suspicions as to whether the boy had pocketed it.  The woman wasn't at home, but did give us her landline and cell numbers.  She then promised to contact my wife when she did get home so we could arrange to go and pick it up.

By late evening, we hadn't heard anything so we rang Vodafone again to see if the systems were back up and we could get the bar put on.  We were able to get this done this time, so we asked if they could tell us if there'd been any activity on the phone.  The CSR told us that the last activity had been mid-afternoon, but couldn't tell us any more due to "privacy issues".  This surprised us as my wife had PIN-verified plus she confirmed three sets of personal details - why couldn't she know what's happened on her own phone?

(I have since tried registering my wife for My Vodafone so she could see if there was any activity listed in thee, but of course you need to enter a validation code that's sent via SMS to the phone.)

Its now the next afternoon, and we haven't heard from the woman with our phone.  Unfortunately, we've misplaced the piece of paper with her phone numbers on (as you do when you have kids), so we have no way of contacting her outside of ringing the phone, which isn't being answered.

The way I see it... if we haven't heard from her by Monday, we claim it as lost/stolen with the police so we can do an insurance claim, and get the phone disabled remotely.  Really can't think of any other solution.