PG County Police with Pogue’s iPhone.

Most people who lose a phone just assume it’s as good as gone. New York Times tech writer David Pogue isn’t most people, though.

Earlier this week, Pogue couldn’t find his iPhone has he headed home to Connecticut on Amtrak. Whether stolen or simply lost, Pogue was upset—though not ready to give up. After using the phone’s GPS capabilities and the Find my iPhone app, along with a healthy dosage of help from his many followers on Twitter, he was able to narrow down the location of the phone to a home in Seat Pleasant, Md.

He contacted the Prince George’s County Police Department, who sent an officer to the home in search of the lost phone. Writes Pogue of what happened next:

By the end of the day, the local police were actually at the house, with me on the phone. Find My iPhone has a great feature: From the iCloud.com Web site, you can make the phone ping, very loudly, for two minutes, even if its ringer is switched off. Over and over and over, I pinged the phone, so that the officer might hear it as he toured the house. My heart was in my throat; it was a cat-and-mouse game of GPS versus possible Bad Guy. I just kept hitting Refresh on the Find My iPhone screen, over and over again, in case the phone moved again.

Over an hour he spent searching. The backyard. The next-door house. The driveway. He never heard it, and he never found the phone. Near the end of his search, the phone went offline again. Either its battery died, or somebody got smart and shut it down so I couldn’t track it anymore.

I wasn’t worried about the data. The phone is password-protected, and of course the app lets me remotely wipe it clean of any data at any time. I was just bummed to lose a very expensive phone.

The police kept searching the area indicated by Find My iPhone — and eventually they found the phone in the backyard, in the grass, safe and sound.

Pogue admits that he was lucky—1.4 million Twitter followers and a responsive police department certainly helped, after all. But it’s a lesson to the rest of us that will invariably lose a phone in our lifetimes: keep up hope, and make sure to sign up for the Find my iPhone app.

@pogue Here’s your iPhone safe & sound. We’ll FedEx it tonight. #poguephoneseriousemergency twitter.com/PGPDJulie/stat…

— Julie Parker (@PGPDJulie) August 2, 2012