In the vast expanse of Toronto — its cloud-scraping apartments holding together some two million residents — one woman reached out for the aid of her neighbours in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

But Liz Bertorelli’s door knocks went unanswered.

So began a millennial saga that has captured social media’s attention with a mix of pity and amusement.

Bertorelli dropped her phone from her balcony. She could see it, but she couldn’t reach it. So she took to Twitter — using a friend’s phone — to chronicle her attempts to retrieve her cellphone.

“What did I do tonight? Oh ya know, dropped my phone off balcony to the unit below,” the first dispatch said at 4:48 a.m., an attached photo showing the mobile device lying on the balcony of the unit below.

While drop tests have become something of a staple to measure the durability of new mobile devices (allocated amateur scientific measures like “waist height” and “head height” drops by savvy tech-testers) Bertorelli was less than pleased with the balcony-height test she’d inadvertently conducted.

“Watchin’ notifications roll in from afar is devastating,” she tweeted plaintively.

Her tweet immediately resonated, with over 6,000 social media users interacting with the first message alone. Bertorelli continued to document the process.

She lobbed a written note over the balcony’s edge; it landed, perfectly, on the neighbour’s outdoor table. The wind, however, had other ideas.

“Noooo, note blew off the table,” came the update at 1:06 p.m. As the hours rolled on, Bertorelli’s retrieval efforts became increasingly ridiculous.

“I’ve got a Swifter and duck tape (sic),” read another, followed by an image of all the long objects she could find, like a broom and a guitar. She mused on a more philosophical meanings. “Thought: is this how Romeo and Juliette felt?”

She tweeted out photos of drones, asking for internet advice on whether to engage the technology in her rescue pursuits. There were updates on the door-knocking attempts, to no avail. Her neighbours simply weren’t home.

An ominous weather forecast photo warned of a storm coming. A friend arrived, and they drank to the electronic device’s looming fate. Bertorelli lowered a plastic bag on a string in an attempt to shield it from the rain.

“May the odds be ever in your favour, sweet prince,” she wrote at 4:40 p.m.

The string of tweets roused the aid of the internet, with users offering their best advice. Even British actor Stephen Fry got in on the saga, chiming in that the tension was almost unbearable.

Bertorelli replied back, pointing the famous Brit’s attention to the Trevor Project while he waited for an outcome.

The Trevor Project provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ+ youth across the country. Their website cites 45,000 calls to their “Lifeline” in one year. When eyes were on Bertorelli’s Twitter account for the comical saga, she urged Twitter users to donate.

“I’m getting followers right now, so I might as well do something,” she told the Star Thursday afternoon. As well as her day job, she’s been a merchandiser for Toronto Pride through her apparel company, so the Trevor Project had always been on her radar, she said.

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Of course, there’s no way to know for sure what it was about Bertorelli’s plight that captured internet traction. Forbes has previously cited an average of 500 million tweets being posted each day, leaving the creation of a “viral” post somewhat of an elusive ideal.

But, while Bertorelli is keeping a sense of perspective — “I’m lucky enough to own and pay for a phone to begin with, and I’m obviously just making fun,” she told the Star, chuckling — she maintains that there’s something universal to her plight.

“Every single person who’s lucky enough to have some sort of device has feared or been in this situation before,” she said, noting that her phone is filled with cherished and valuable information, from photographs to contacts.

“So from that perspective, it’s an emotional connection that we probably all share,” she said.

Finally, just after 9 p.m. Thursday, Bertorelli managed to use part of a drone to snag the phone and pull it up to her balcony.

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