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Toronto’s Joffrey Lupul puts call out to Twitter to help find his iPhone and succeeds

Joffrey Lupul

You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it. We’ve left our cell phone somewhere and couldn’t locate it.

The terrors, the shakes, the panic sets in as you try to retrace your steps to locating it. You use someone else’s phone to call it to see if you managed to get it lost under a table after a night of shenanigans.

Or if you’re Toronto Maple Leafs forward Joffrey Lupul you accidentally left your iPhone in a Toronto taxi cab and got scared. How does one go about recovering that? Lupul took his action to Twitter where he put out the call to his 27,000+ followers to help him find his missing phone.

LupulTweet

Lupul offered up a reward for the user that helped find his phone: tickets to the next five Maple Leafs home games and a jersey. A pretty sweet reward if there ever was one since Leafs tickets and a jersey aren’t exactly cheap.

After just ten minutes, Lupul tweeted another update to say the phone was located. He told James Mirtle of The Globe & Mail about his ordeal and about how the power of social media came through for him.

Lupul was amazed so many people took his tweet seriously.

“It was honestly just kind of a shot in the dark,” he said. “I was half joking.

“I called [the cab company] and when I spoke to the lady, she said ‘oh we’ve been expecting your call.’ I think they’re probably so annoyed with me now. But I got it back.”

Because no one person earned the reward, Lupul said he plans to give the cab driver tickets to the Leafs next home game, which will be tomorrow night against the Pittsburgh Penguins.


It’s a bit of a silly story, but it’s all fun nonetheless. If you’re a hockey fan and you’re not using Twitter, you’re missing out on a lot of fun things like this as it’s one of the mediums the NHL and its players have really warmed up to to help reach out to fans. While there’s been instances like those surrounding new Ducks goalie Dan Ellis that have made it awkward for some players, you’ve got other guys like Paul Bissonnette of Phoenix that have latched onto it for all that it’s worth and made it their own personal haven for fame.

While making themselves available through such a public entity can be both awkward and fantastic for fans, guys like Lupul and Bissonnette that have embraced it through good and bad have set a solid example of how to have fun with the medium and not make it dreadfully boring or overly self-serving just the same. Sure team PR people might have a little heart attack each time something comes out, the fans are enjoying the interaction and that goes a long way to winning fans over.