How did this happen? I stared at my phone in disbelief. I knew I had entered the name and phone number of my primary care physician. I even had his cellphone and email that I rarely used. But nothing was there in my list of contacts.

I had never checked on how many contacts, but there must have been hundreds, maybe thousands. But why should the contact information for PCP suddenly disappear? Had I somehow deleted it? Was this a virus like a flesh-eating parasite consuming all the information I had collected over the years?

To check it out, I conducted a search for Ward 5 Councilman Ed Ladouceur who I’d called in the past week. I typed in his name. Nothing popped up. Now I was flummoxed. I searched for Jack Kirby, the Ward 7 councilman. I hadn’t contacted him recently.

Not that it makes sense, but perhaps the phone was losing its short term memory. I hadn’t texted or called Jack in at least six months, but after seeing him at the Democratic City Committee steak fry last Wednesday, I wanted to follow up on a story concerning Midgley Avenue in Arnold’s Neck, which is in today’s Beacon.

I typed in Kirby. Up popped Michelle Kirby-Chapman, a member of the Warwick School Committee, but no Jack.

I started imagining far-out thoughts. Could this be a targeted attack? Had the iPhone I recently acquired been nefariously programmed to delete Democrats or elected officials. I typed in Joe Walsh, Lincoln Chafee and Mayor Frank Picozzi. All of their contacts were gone. What about the numbers for relatives and family members? They were there, but then none are elected officials.

I dug a little deeper, plugging in the names of people I have come to know over the years. Some were there but many more weren’t. Certainly something technical had gone wrong, but I couldn’t help but make the parallel to meeting someone I know but being at a loss to name them.

I mentioned this to my kids and was relieved to learn that they too run into this situation. I find it helpful to think beyond the current circumstances. If my interactions with a person are usually when they’re on the job and I bump into them at a roadside rest area in Massachusetts, I can be lost.

You can play along and carry a conversation without using a name, hopeful that everything will click into place and suddenly come into focus. Or you play the “honest card” and ask, “help me with your name” which can make you feel stupid.

 My son, Jack, runs a mental checklist of the alphabet to come up with the name. It works for him and I’ll have to try it.

But obviously that was no help with my artificial memory, the one I didn’t realize I relied so much on until it started breaking down. I stopped in to talk with Rory at ProWireless, who has replaced phone batteries over the years. He would know what to do. Surely what I was experiencing wasn’t unique.

I described the condition. He asked a few questions. He shut down the phone and on restarting it ran a few updates that I had neglected to do. When it came to my contacts nothing changed. He didn’t have an answer.

Could there be a copy of all my contacts somewhere in the cloud? Supposedly, or so I thought, it was all being saved. Who would know and how would one go about restoring it?

Might my old phone be of help? I powered it up and although not connected to a service, it still contained my contacts from months ago. There was the list of 3,971 names and numbers that at one time had been on my new phone. More than 3,500 of those contacts had evaporated.

On Monday I reported to Gaffney Physical Therapy for my appointment with Elly Sledzik. She’s been great in restoring mobility in the wake of back and knee operations. I told her of my frustration.

“Let me see your phone,” she asked. I plugged in the password and she went to work. She quickly announced I needed to buy additional space on the cloud, an announcement I had been told to ignore. For 99 cents a month it seemed worth a try anyway. Elly was joined by Gaffney’s “technical wizard” Erika Capobianco.

“She knows how to fix everything,” said Elly. I got out my credit card and started punching in numbers. It appeared I had completed the transaction, however, in order to complete the process I needed the password to my email. I didn’t have that with me. Erika handed back the phone with an open screen for the password.

“Don’t close this,” she said, advising me to enter the password when I got home.

I never got to do that. The phone froze. I had no alternative but to shut it off. Deflated, I was prepared to make a trip to the Apple store in Providence.

I turned it on and miraculously all my contacts were there.

Now, if only recalling names was that easy.