A good friend in a discord server (where we are many folks internationally, but close knit in sorts, and many have an avid and acute interest in history) linked something really awesome.
'Small' story during WWII about civilian achievements in the wake of wartime. It was really an awesome read.
I lost my phone!
Which is what I would've said to myself, much less typed or even posted anywhere, in anxiety if it did happen. But it did, last 1:55pm, and I had a 2pm appointment. Not one to be late, I arrived on-site twenty minutes earlier; at this time, my phone fell out of my pocket and made a clattering sound (and I always confuse this with something in opening the door of the public transport I'm in >_>). Cue ten minutes passing and me checking my everything on 'where is my phone' and being forgetfully misplacing with 'ok maybe I left it at home...but then I wouldn't be able to tell the time because I don't use a watch on my noodly arms', until it hit me to connect the sound with 'ok it might've fallen here'.
One issue was me disembarking right next to a metal fenced street gutter. Before this I had taken a tiny snack (nice cheap chocolate bar), and folded the wrapper into a nice, small triangle for better space management in throwing it away. I put this wrapper in the same pocket my phone was in--I saw this wrapper on the sidewalk near the gutter. I feared it fell in while wondering the blank emotion of shock: "wait it can't have fallen in but what if it did what do I do now?'. Which was until someone called out to me from across the street; a motorcycle driver asked if I was looking for a phone, and mentioned two people retrieved it and passed along the route I walked to where my appointment was.
I was glad for two sources of confirmation--the small tidy trash (that I threw away), and this nice fellow who had to be somewhere else other than telling me this. So running to the nearest police precinct, reporting a lost phone and using their services to call my phone, and meeting the two awesome people who had retrieved it was just twenty minutes of first-time anxiety in a box. Those two people were just at the pharmacy right next to where I dropped off; they decided to stay there after seeing the phone, and retrieving it, because there's the usual stigma of 'people being mean' and that it would be called later on anyway. Said phone was found extremely close from the gutter, and these gutters are usually multiple feet deep for flood drainage (being a mountain city). I am doubly glad I got a protective case for the phone, and a protective screen.
So now I have 2 new friends (sadly not from my locality), and my phone back in place where it belongs: Not lost.