lost contacts on iphone 5

Yesterday I bought a mini ipad. when the guy in the apple store set it up it wiped all my contacts off my iphone 5. These are all my business contacts and I'm really concerned I have lost them for good. I went back to the store and they were able to tell me that the contacts are not stored:

on the phone

on the SIM

on the icloud

or in any of my email accounts

They have no idea where my contacts are.

They are unable to advise me if I create a new record where that is saved - it wouldn't be to any of these places but they must be somewhere?!

This is all very unhelpful to me. I wish hadn't bought the ipad now and I am scared to connect my iphone to my imac incase the phone over writes everything in my imac address book.

My iphone contacts were made up contacts added to my imac address book and other contacts that I added to my phone now and then.

Can anyone help? My phone is useless to me now, the apple staff don't know what to advise me to do, and I don't want to use my imac or ipad incase all the syncing across email accounts and icloud wipe everything off.

Thank you