Smartphone’s Can’t Swim

With all the poise and style of an Olympic high diver my Smartphone leapt from my shirt pocket towards the water below. If it had been a movie or a scene from CSI you would have seen it drop in slow motion, then the camera would pan to my face to get a shot of my eyes bulging out in horror and my mouth wide open as I screamed “Nooooooooooooo”. Next there would be a slow motion shot as it broke the surface of the water and then the waves rippling out from the point of impact.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view, the camera was there and my Smartphone in the blink of any eye travelled the distance from my shirt pocket to the water below.

As soon as I had recovered from the shock I grabbed the Smartphone from the water and removed the cover, the battery and then the SIM card. I dried it with paper towels but it looked terminal.

I let the components dry out at 22 deg C for 24 hours, then installed the SIM card and battery. I then connected the power charger to the mains, switched the mains power on but didn’t switch the Smartphone on at that stage. I left it like that for an hour and then switched the Smartphone on. I let it boot up, shut down and repeated that cycle three times and believe it or not, the Smartphone survived.

I have since learned that if you can immerse your Smartphone in rice it will absorb the moisture or if you are near a Radio Shack they sell a pack to dry out your Smartphone (guess Smartphone getting dropped into the water must be more common than I expected!).

Having restored the Smartphone to life I was shocked to discover three days later that my netbook had gone on strike. The folks at NUNO (National Union of Netbook Operators) decided that my netbook should come out on strike in sympathy with the emotional trauma that my Smartphone had suffered. For no reason that I can understand the blue screen of death appeared on my netbook along with the message ‘files missing’. Now I don’t know about you but I don’t routinely carry the installation discs for my netbook with me on vacation (did I forget to mention that all this happened while I was on vacation) so I was stuffed. I later discovered that it would have made no difference as essentially the netbook was dead.

What have I learned? If you go on vacation, leave the technology behind!

Knoco Ltd