What not to do if you’ve dropped a (sort of) new iPhone down the toilet
Well that didn’t last long. A week after I finally commissioned my new iPhone, I dropped it down the toilet. I might as well have dropped the 400 euros straight down the pan and flushed, and cut out the middle man completely.
I used to be quite scornful of people who dropped their phones down toilets. First of all, it’s quite a small receptacle — the actual toilety bit of the toilet — and it seemed odd that so many people manage to get their phones down there, especially since many are significantly less accurate with their own bodily functions. But also, the big judgey head on me decided, if people are so attached to their devices that they can’t even use the toilet without them, then they deserve what they get.
But none of that takes account of the back pocket of gym shorts or the fact that sometimes, when nature calls, you just don’t have time to conduct a personal inventory. And so it came to pass that moments before a personal training session last week, my new iPhone ended up in the toilety bit of the toilet, below the waterline.
And here’s the rub: “it doesn’t matter, because it’s a new iPhone and they’re waterproof,” complete strangers queued up to tell me. My trainer, zooming into my garden from Nicaragua, was the first with those glad tidings. But although the phone is new to me, it’s a reconditioned older model of the iPhone, dating from those barbaric times when phones weren’t toilet-proof. Still, I dried it off and it did make a heroic effort to carry on working through the first part of the training session. Then the screen went blank. And for anyone planning on dropping their phone down the toilet, listen up to what I did next, because it turned out that this was my biggest mistake (well, after dropping the cursed thing down the jacks, that is): I plugged it into the charger.
Well, if it had gone up in flames, it couldn’t have been a more dramatic outcome. The second I connected the phone, The Small Girl — the Queen of Soggy Technology — came flying into my room, feet scarcely touching the ground, screaming at me not to plug it in. But it was too late. I had, the internet confirmed, fried my circuits. The woman in Swappie, from whom I had just bought the phone, backed up The Small Girl and the internet and offered me 30 quid off my next phone. The man in the kiosk under the stairs in Rathfarnham Shopping Centre shook his head sadly and opened the back and suggested a bag of rice but he wasn’t confident. Still, I decanted the rice and the phone and put them into the hot press, on the shelf beside The Small Girl’s laptop which was also drying out from a close encounter with a cup of coffee (I am considering no longer keeping bed clothes and towels in the hot press and just making it an official repository for tech.)
But it was all to no avail. So now I am 400 quid lighter and back with the previous phone which doesn’t receive texts and thinks it’s been lost by the side of the Blessington Road.
I’m trying not to dwell on the money but it’s hard, coming in the same week as an argument with the VHI over a medical scan they initially said they’d cover half the cost of and then apparently changed their minds after the event. I suppose I should clarify that that wouldn’t be their version of events but the net result is that I spent €460 on a scan in the firm belief that I would get half the cost back. Since the scan happily revealed nothing, I have now written off that cost as being a complete waste of money as well. In summary, I have just spent €860 on nothing.
Succour, when it arrived, came from the oddest source. In an episode of the deliciously funny podcast My Therapist Ghosted Me, Joanne McNally blithely revealed that she never returns unwanted goods she’s bought because she believes that if you made your bed, you have to lie on it. I’ve applied that logic to my own luckless situation and decided she has a point. And it would have been far worse if the scan hadn’t been clear and if my old phone couldn’t take WhatsApp messages. I’m not exactly punching the air but I suppose we have to take our little victories where we find them. Even if below the watermark in the toilet seems an unlikely place to start.