Save Gray Powell: The Guy Who Lost the iPhone

Here’s one of those names that you’ve never heard before but will inevitably be a Trivial Pursuit answer… Gray Powell. He’s the Apple software engineer who left his iPhone 4G prototype in a beer garden in Redwood, California. Doh!

March 18 was the fateful night. That’s when Gray had a few steins of beer and left the extra top secret cell phone on a bar stool at the Gourmet Haus Staudt. But who can blame him? It was his 27th birthday, so he had a couple of drinks, and happened to breech Apple security in the worst possible way. Apparently the company is so paranoid they black out the conference room windows and chain some prototypes to desks, so we’re not sure how this could actually happen.

So while the 2006 North Carolina State University grad, drowns his sorrows in yet more brew at the Gourmet Haus, supporters are trying to give him a helping hand. They've built a brand new Facebook page and set a very public goal of having 1,000,000 fans by the weekend. 

They might pull it off. It's already up to 7,395 Likes (that’s the new Facebook terminology for those of you who haven’t been there lately). And it’s growing steadily. It's funny, too. The personal info reads:

“Location: Anywhere away from Steve” (that would be Jobs to you un-Apple friendly readers) and “Phone: Lost it :(”

Hey, you’ve got to have a sense of humor if you’re going to try to parlay an egregious mistake into a media frenzy.

So just like when Conan O’Brien was losing his Tonight Show job, fans are coming to Gray’s rescue with a slew of Save Gray Powell Facebook pages. Of course, if you remember correctly, the Facebook thing didn’t help Conan keep his job. But maybe if Powell suffers a similar fate, Coco can get him a job at TBS.