Trust Your Gut: How Instinct Solved My Stolen iPhone

Something wild happened to me last night. 🤯

I was enjoying the Fever 333 show at Ancienne Belgique (they were supporting Enter Shikari), dancing around in a soft mosh pit, when I felt something weird on my leg. I touched my pocket : my iPhone just got stolen. I looked on the ground, looked around me, nothing. Just people enjoying the show + that ONE guy who didn't seem to be in the moment - I couldn't even name a reason for this feeling, and you know what we say about assumptions…

I grabbed my friend out of the mosh pit, explained him the thing and we ran to the entrance. Bumped into a security guy, explained the story again and as I had no idea what actually happened, he was like "Yeah but… there's not much we could do" - at this point I estimated my chances to ever see my iPhone again at 0,001%. But then I saw that same ONE guy heading out of the venue. I told my friend and the security guy "I'm sure it's him". Felt a bit guilty because I had nothing concrete supporting this except my instinct - but we followed him outdoors. He didn't notice us and we observed him very closely for a few seconds.

Another dude with a crackhead look arrived from behind and passed very closely to our guy. They didn't look at each other, they didn't even do a move but I knew at that time that something just happened. The guy #2 started to walk faster and I instinctively followed him. My friend followed me and we caught the guy : "You have something that belongs to me" I said. He froze a bit, seemed scared. I insisted - he handed me 2 phones (including mine) and left. We should have retained him and called the police but we ran back to the venue to catch the guy #1 - unfortunately the security guy dropped his attention and #1 took this opportunity to just disappear. 😶‍🌫️

Couldn't believe that I had my iPhone back when I was so sure a few minutes before that it would be gone forever. I still don't understand how all of this could happen and how these unlikely events occurred : spotting the thief from just a feeling - being there at the right time when he got out of the venue - spotting an unnoticeable handover. 👀

In addition to the relief of not having to spend some hundreds of €€€ for a piece of technology 💸, I'm trying to highlights some learnings here :

1) The power of focus. With the adrenalin boost, I felt like my mind was sharper than it has ever been. I would love to understand how to reproduce this on demand (no, drugs are not an option)
2) The illusion of safe space. 25+ years of attending rock / metal / punk concerts and nothing wrong ever happened. I'm afraid nothing is ever fully safe. You can only assume the intentions of people around you

On my to-do : Buy some jeans with zipped pockets or anything else to keep my belongings safe.