My unwitting debut on Chinese reality TV

What is it about newcomers in a foreign land?

There I was, feeling quite settled after a few days in Beijing, with my spacious apartment, high-speed Internet, new cellphone and local bank account.

I'd certainly hit the ground running. My belongings were duly organized around the apartment (or as organized as they were ever going to be), the table was set up with laptop for the Net, I was already loading the phone with my new contacts and arranged for my wages to be credited to my bank account.

Boy, this was the smoothest move I'd ever made. Now all I had to do was stock up the fridge.

One short taxi ride later and I was rushing around the local Wu Mei supermarket, being exceptionally adventurous and filling my trolley with all sorts of exotic Chinese foods like bread and margarine, cheese, instant coffee, corn flakes, English Breakfast tea and sugar.

Return taxi ride 10 yuan? No worries mate, xie xie and aaaargh! Where's my cellphone?

This little beauty had cost 1,100 yuan ($157) and had all sorts of wondrous extras, like an MP4 player, video camera, ability to upload my annoying ringtones and even a ridiculous digital fountain pen mimicking the writing of phone numbers as I entered them. I'd heard you could also call people on it but, hey, what's the rush.

So where was it? It should've been easy enough to find out - it wasn't likely to be the taxi, so there was only one possible answer: I'd taken it out of my pocket and left it on the counter when I burrowed inside for money to pay the checkout girl.

"Forget it mate," advised my friend Patrick. "I've lost three cellphones since I've been here. It's gone for good. I once phoned my own number to see who had my phone and this guy said 'what do you mean, it's my phone now', so get over it and buy another one."

Nah, not me. I'm not giving up that easily. Back to Wu Mei and I tried to explain my plight to anyone in uniform. I even found the same checkout girl but she knew nothing.

Many garbled Chinglish exchanges later and it seemed like half the staff were running over to help.

Suddenly, a breakthrough! A man apparently calling himself the manager beckoned me to follow him somewhere and I duly followed, with five to six excited staff in tow.

Out of the building, down a path, into a dark, dingy building and suddenly, there we were in the control room for the supermarket's closed-circuit TV monitors.

During the previous 20 minutes or so, they had diligently been scouring every second of footage from that afternoon's recordings and there I was, 90 minutes earlier, being served at the check-out. We all watched intently as items passed from my hand to the check-out girl's and into the carry-bag. Hand into pocket, bill paid - and not a sign of the phone. There, in front of my eyes was incontrovertible evidence that I hadn't lost the phone where I thought. Patrick was right, I thought, forget it.

Two days later, with new phone in hand, I cuaght another taxi home after shopping. As I paid and got out, I looked over my shoulder, just to check I hadn't left anything behind and there it was, my new phone lying on the floor. Oops.