THIS week I became a victim of a very common crime – mobile phone theft – and it felt like I’d lost a limb.

It’s not until that little black box is no longer in your pocket that you realise just how often you interact with it. I’ve got (had) an iPhone and it would serve up my emails, let me surf the web, listen to music, catch up on Twitter, oh, and make phone calls (remember them?).

It’s a veritable personal assistant and one that’s now in the hands of some lowlife thief. But what makes the whole episode worse is how it happened…

For some reason, which I can’t remember now, instead of driving or flying to a meeting in Manchester I decided to take the train (remember them?).

It was all quite pleasant at first and I relaxed knowing the M6 or air traffic control couldn’t get in the way of me getting to my meeting on time.

Problem was I relaxed a little bit too much and when I needed to get up for two minutes I left the phone on the table. If you did that on a plane, you could be pretty sure it’d still be there when you returned. Not on a train – it was gone for good.

When I arrived at Manchester I headed to the lost property office and asked if it had been handed in. I can’t repeat what the attendant said… because I couldn’t understand him through the laughing.

Fortunately the phone had a pass-code so the thief won’t be able to rack up a ridiculous bill phoning his mates in Australia, but it’s the hassle of sorting it all out that’s the real pain.

It did get me thinking, though. Back when I started out as a regional manager in this business I got my first ‘mobile’ – it was so big it made my briefcase look like a lunchbox. Large phones might be a bit of an embarrassment now, but it’s highly likely that one would have still been on the table when I returned – not because it was rubbish, but because it would have taken three of them to lift it off the train!

IMPRESSIVE FIGURES

It’s always good to hear how we’re doing in relation to our rivals and at a management meeting this week some startling figures emerged.

Since we spoke at our conference at the O2, we have managed to outsell Toyota and Honda – combined! As if that wasn’t impressive enough, it was also revealed we are just 70 units short of Kia and Hyundai’s combined sales.

If we have a good June – and with the sun shining and moods lifting that could well be the case – we could be ahead of Toyota, Honda, Kia and Hyundai in the sales charts before the summer holidays.