Wednesday, July 30, 2008

A confession. Stupidity. Glee.

I need to preface this entry. A lot.
1. I am not a big computer person (really! I promise!)
2. I am not pregnant or getting divorced.

I have an iPhone (did you know? I don't like mentioning it. Because people obsessed with their iPhones terrify me). I also have a Macbook. And an iPod.
Despite these things, I am not a "Mac" person. I do not think Steve Jobs is god (Blasphemy!?! But then who am I to know). I just think that it can't hurt to have a computer that is speedy as well as beautiful. Oh so pretty.
When the iPhone was announced I thought what's the point? I have an iPod. And a phone with a camera. Why oh why would I ever need them combined? And then I went into the Apple store on Regent Street.
It might have been all the space and the white and the shiny, but I picked up an iPhone, played with it for ooo all of five minutes, turned to Craig and said It must Be Mine. MUST and he shook his head in that wise, pc-loving, Nokia-phone0using, ever-so-patient way that he has (argh) and told me that of course I could get one. If I saved up for it. Damn him and his sensible ways.
So I saved. And saved. I got bored with saving and then I saved some more.
Finally I bought one. And it was beautiful and it was mine. And I loved it (obsessed? with my phone. Not the iPhone in general). Craig even played with it for a while and now secretly (or not so secretly) kind-of-almost-sort-of wants one of his own. Victory.

I told you that story, to tell you this story.

Two nights ago I was in my bedroom collecting clothes to wash. I grabbed my phone on my way out of my room and thoughtlessly (actually. I lie. I thought about putting it in my pocket but ...) chucked it on top of my pile of clothes. Do you see where this is going?
In the little black case I lovingly bought for it, I chucked it on top of my black and dark grey clothes that I was about to put into the washing machine. Do you see now? Oh, the agony of hindsight.

Fast forward two hours. My laundry had beeped to completion and I thought to check my messages before I put my clothes in the dryer. But where was my phone? (Agony!) I swear, I almost passed out when I looked at the ominously quiet laundry, opened the lid of the washing machine and, stomach dropping, saw my poor baby phone, the darling phone I had named Dracula (yes. really.) sitting alone at the bottom of the washing machine, isolated from the skulking clump of wet laundry. Agony.

My mind shut off and I raced upstairs, stared in the mirror and cursed myself. How could I tell Craig that I had been so monumentally stupid? I would never hear the end of it.
And with that, I raced back downstairs, secretly collected me phone from the laundry and tried to act nonchalant as I collected a tea towel, a bowl of dry rice, & my mother's hairdryer. No one noticed. I don't think that says much for my usual behaviour.

My phone wouldn't turn on. Agony. After a couple of hours in a bowl of dry rice, on top of a heater, covered with a tea towel, & dried with the hair dryer it was not only turning on but receiving text messages!
There was an almost beautiful mottling on the screen but it was fading and after a further hour with the hairdryer, and being left in the rice overnight, even that was gone!
I did dream that I would wake up to find it was over-dried & disintegrating, falling apart in my hands. HATE you subconscious.

Now my darling Dracula phone looks just as it ever did. Perhaps even better! it fought the washing machine (killer of expensive sweaters, eater of socks) and won.
It is older, & wiser but bears no actual scars.



Perhaps the touch screen is marginally less sensitive in areas and I don't know yet if the battery life has been diminished but if that's all my punishment for such stupidity? I'll take it.

I won't hear anything said against the iPhone ever ever again. It is made of envy & pieces of rainbow.