Sunday, November 23, 2008

Phases of iPhone Death

I dropped my iPhone this morning — into the toilet. Don't worry: the water was clean. Well, as clean as toilet water can be. I pulled it out immediately, and tried in vain to turn it off.

  1. The water made it impossible to use the touchscreen. I pawed at the "Slide to power off" bar for a few frantic seconds before giving up.
  2. The screen quickly donned some pixelated version of the multicolored empty-TV-station livery. Not good.
  3. The colored pixels all went black, and rather slowly. It was like watching the phone's soul extricate itself from its metal chassis and sojourn back to the great Jobs In The Sky.
  4. I laid the phone on top of a baseboard heater to encourage evaporation. The screen was still backlit, but showed only black. I went away dejected.
  5. Roughly ten minutes later I came back, and the phone had booted up. I attempted to open Safari, but the touchscreen freaked out: Instead of loading Safari, I wound up calling my friend Paul. I hard reset the phone before the call could complete.
  6. The phone rebooted and asked me to plug it into iTunes, or "Slide for emergency". Fearing the caprices of a sporadic touchscreen, I attempted to power down (again) by holding Home and the Power key. I don't mind calling Paul on an early Sunday, but I'd rather not have to explain my situation to EMS.
  7. After powering down for a moment, the phone booted spontaneously. It told me that it had been freshly activated, and started like normal. The touchscreen failed to respond.
  8. I turned it off, and it began a cyclic binge of rebooting and dying — all on its own. I went away dejected, again.
  9. After church, I came back to a phone that appeared to be fully functional — with the glaring exception that the touchscreen didn't work.


And thus my phone sits, encased in the dysfunctional ice of the 9th circle of iPhone Hell. Lame.

3 comments:

mannkind said...

That sucks! But look on the bright side... it's time for a new iPhone!

Anonymous said...

How sad. :-(

Sarah Partain said...

just found your blog...so sad about the phone. Amos loved it so!