You're lying in bed and you get "the call". No, not that call, but a call you dread. My oldest daughter called me after i'd gone to bed to ask me if I could track her iphone with the "where's my iphone" app on my phone. 

This is where I should probably tell you that this isn't the first time my daughter has lost her phone. If you're a parent I probably don't have to tell you this. She calls me in tears to tell me that someone must have snatched her phone from the tabletop where she was having coffee with a friend. And since this is a reoccuring problem, and since she is a pretty smart kid she has installed the app on her phone. So I log onto the icloud, type in her account and password and... BOOM! There's is a GPS dot of my daughters stolen phone on the move about 4 blocks from her current location.

So, unsure of how to proceed, I advised my daughter to call the police and explain her situation. She called me back in 5 minutes and conveyed their inability to respond. (I understand their limited resources, and that a missing phone is more of an "emergency" to a 23 year old)

Now comes the decision. Do I let it go and teach the tough love lesson of being more responsible? Or do I act on the anger I feel as a father and victim of a crime, with the information to right the situation and go get the bad guy myself? Needless to say I acted with my heart and not my head and put on my leathers, stuck a 3 foot ice axe down the back of my jacket and mounted my Harley.

Picture this, rolling toward Capital hill, 11:30 at night to confront the thief. I pull up to the GPS location of my daughters missing phone, the grass lawn of a church. It's quiet and dark, there's no one around and I can see a tent pitched on the dimly lit lawn. I take out my Mag flashlight to look over the lawn, hoping the thief threw the phone when my daughter activated the ping effect on the app. No such luck.

So I sent another ping signal to my daughters phone. And then I hear it. The pinging sound is now coming from inside the tent. Whoever stole my daughters phone is 10 feet away and I have them!

At this moment, I muster all the testosterone I can manage and step into the dim light of the church window to cast as omminious a shadow as possible. Ice ax raised I shout "Hey! You have my phone and I want it!" No response. So I yell again, "I want my phone!" and i knock on the tent post with the ice axe. Nothing. At this point I notice that the tent has a mesh top. I summon up the courage to step forward to look INSIDE the tent, not knowing exactly what to expect. As I look inside, I see... nothing. No drug crazed homeless maniac like i'd created in my wild imagination. But there was a backpack. a medium sized black backpack. And it was pinging.

I couldn't believe my luck! I had found her phone and didn't have to knock on some strange door or confront anyone to "do the right thing".

But where was this guy? Quickly, I grabbed the backpack and carried it to the middle of the lawn. Looking around constantly, I started to carefull go thru it's contents. Opening various pockets until I found what I'd came for, my daughters stolen iphone. Leaving the backpack where it was, I briskly walked back to my bike, started the engine and roared off into the night!

What a feeling! I had won! I had beaten the bad guys and righted the wrong! Then it hit me. Did I just do the stupidest thing I had ever done in my life? Did I just put myself in an incredibly dangerous situation, potentially risking serious injury to retrieve a phone? Damn right I did! It may have been a stupid thing to do, but I felt like the King of the world! And you should have seen the look on my daughters face when I handed her her phone and told her my story.

But what was I supposed to do? What would you have done in my situation? Did I mention that I felt like the King of the world?