Twitter | @Zackrydz

Man Loses Phone, Later Finds It Loaded With Monkey Selfies

After recently "cleaning" the house to find a pair of lost AirPods (let's be honest, it was more like tearing the house apart and putting it back together again), I get the increasing sense of urgency at finding lost tech, especially a phone, when it goes missing. It's not just the expense of a thing — although it is also that — it's also the time you put into finding it and the gnawing sense that you've gone and lost it for good this time.

There's usually a good explanation, of course. You set it down absentmindedly in an unusual spot. Or you tucked it away in an unusual spot quite intentionally to keep it safe and secure and then completely forgot the spot because it's unusual.

But on rare occasions, you'll actually get a good story out of it.

Malaysia's Zackrydz Rodzi can certainly say he got a good story out of losing his phone for a day.

Twitter | @Zackrydz

The 20-year-old computer science student was mystified at first when his phone went missing while he was asleep. There was no indication of a break-in but his phone was gone.

"There was no sign of robbery. The only thing on my mind was is it some kind of sorcery," he told the BBC.

Subsequent searches of his home were fruitless.

He looked until the next afternoon, when his father noticed a monkey hanging around outside the house. They tried calling his phone and heard it ringing not far away, out in the jungle.

A short search later, the pair found Rodzi's phone at the base of a palm tree on top of some leaves, muddied but intact.

Rodzi's uncle suggested taking a look at the pics on the phone to see if anything new had popped up.

Twitter | @Zackrydz

Hey, you never know. Sometimes people who find lost phones do take pics with them. It happens.

And for Rodzi's phone, it did indeed happen. In fact, his camera roll was filled with photos, all taken by a monkey.

Rodzi now believes the monkey entered the house through a window his brother left open.

Although Rodzi told the BBC that the area doesn't have a history of monkeys stealing things, there's little doubt that that happened in his case. The monkey's face is all over his phone, including a video of it apparently trying to eat the phone.

Rodzi thinks the monkey must have thought the phone was food because of its brightly colored casing.

Twitter | @Zackrydz

Which would also explain why nothing else in his room had been taken.

Since the theft, Rodzi says he's keeping things close at hand. "My house is now in a total lockdown," he told NBC News, saying he didn't want to go through an incident like that again.

h/t: BBC, NBC News

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