Its a Dangerous job....

I am like, the Henry the 8th of phone owners. My cellular devices often meet a cruelly undignified demise long before their normal life expectancy predicts. My retainer has been in service longer than my last 6 cell phones combined, and it has a far nastier job. Lets just take a little looksie at my phones of phonedom past and commiserate over their untimely entrance into that big Verizon store in the sky.

The first phone I ever destroyed was one of the earlier Samsung flip phones. It was silver, and had no outside display screen, camera or any other awesome features to speak of. EXCEPT.. it had a little red indicator light that would flash when I got a text message. I thought I was just so sneaky at school because I could carry on meaningless texting conversations during, YES DURING class. The phone I had just upgraded from was a nokia brick that vibrated like a jackhammer when it was on "silent" and caused electrical anomalies in surrounding devices any time any kind of message or call came to my phone. It was like it had an invisible tractor beam that hooked straight into a satellite. Needless to say, the little red indicator light on my new sleek flip phone was a cutting edge commodity.

One fateful day just outside of Jackson Hole, WY... I was camping with a YSA group next to the snake river. We got back from rafting the river that day and I for some unknown reason decided to put my phone back into my pocket, even though I didn't have service. There was a little creek next to our camp ground that fed into the river, and Holly P and I decided to go frolick in it before dinner time. Everyone else in camp was playing a rousing game of apples to apples at a picnic table near by. I rolled up my jeans as to not get them wet, and began wading around having a jolly good time. Out of no where, I stepped on a mossy rock and fell butt first into the creek. Who would have ever thought there would be a mossy rock at the bottom of a creek. Fat lot of good it did me to roll up my pants. Anyway. A roar of laughter erupted from the picnic table and I stood up slowly, only to find that when I fell I had landed on the swamp thing. Its smushed carcass was spread all over my bum. It looked like I sat in a pile of horse dooty. Holly had come over to help me up and I was laughing so hard that I lost my balance and fell into the creek AGAIN. More Laughter. More swamp nastiness. We made it to the bank and that is when I remembered that my beloved little phone was in my back pocket. It had fallen prey to the carnivorous swamp thing stuck to my behind. There would be no more laughter that day. FAIL.

There were two phones that croaked on their own behalf within the next year. They were faulty. THEY WERE FAULTY OKAY???

My next victim bought the farm after like 2 years of normal aging and a little, shall we say... negligence on my part. Basically, I would just drop it every day. It still totally worked so I was like hmm what the crap. I'll just keep on droppin it. It was a flip phone. One day, I casually dropped it on the ground and, being a flip phone, the top flap just up and fell off. It was still connected to the bottom half with a tiny little optical cable. It looked like Nearly Headless Nick. I very carefully snapped it back together and tada! ... It still worked. Being proud of my accomplishment I thought to myself, "Self, you are cool. I bet you could take it apart again and put it back together and it would STILL work".

Why, why did I tempt fate? I took it apart, but this time accidentally severed its little electrical spinal cord. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put it together again. Death by beheading.

The next phone I got was the LG chocolate. It was kewl. It played music and it was blue and it had a little slidy-outy number pad. I was pretty nice to this phone. I cherished it. But... not enough to pay for a real screen cover to keep it from being scratched. So I coated it in nail polish. It worked. Whatev. Don't judge. I had this phone for a good year before it entered into the dreaded watery grips of Davy Jones Locker. No, it didn't fall into the ocean. It slipped out of my hand while I was filling up the tub for a bubble bath. I seriously screamed NOOOOOOoooooooo(00000) like I had fallen off a cliff. I swear the little nugget screamed back at me for help from the bottom of the bubbly bathtub. My poor little poopsie. (little mermaid reference, not actual poo) I tried to salvage my cherished blue jewel of a phone for a couple days after the incident. Any time I tried to use the touch screen it had a vibrating seizure. It sounded like a dentist drill. It came time to just let go. I should have ceremoniously dropped it into a large body of water like the old lady did with the Heart of the Ocean. Maybe some day when I'm 80 and creepily barefoot and in a nightie on the deck of a ship in the middle of the Atlantic I'll do that. I'll let you know how it goes.

OMGosh so maybe I just went looking for a picture of that scene but somehow ended up spending a half hour looking at youtube montages of Jack and Rose. Woof.

The point of this whole post, is that I have yet again destroyed another phone in the most igmonius of circumstances. I had until yesterday a beautiful functional LG Venus. That phone and I had been through a lot together. Dozens, and I mean literally dozens of long tearful phone calls were made and received. It is a miracle it wasn't waterlogged just from regular phone usage in the last year. It was the closes thing I could find to my dearly beloved LG Chocolate. Ironically, it too suffered a watery death. You could say it went swimming with the fishies. And when I say "swimming" I mean it fell into a a toilet. And when I say "fishies" ... well. I will let your imagination take care of that one. Suffice it to say it has touched things insomuch that I would never press it to my face again. And yes I fished it out. What was I supposed to do? FLUSH? I was in a public bathroom in the JSB. I fished it out and threw it onto the stall floor and just stared at it. What just happened?? My phone touched WHAT? What was I supposed to do now???? I dried it off and washed my hands VIGOROUSLY. It was the perfectly appropriate end to a crappity crap crap weekend. But, I had places to go and tests to take so I just pretended like what had just happened, had not actually happened.

So there I am, studying for a midterm in the Testing Center when all of a sudden, something in my pocket feels warm. Toooooo warm. I pulled out my pee pee phone and it was hotter than lava. The "water" was shorting out the battery. It was making a sizling noise and the camera lense was all fogged up. Sick sick sick sick sickkkkk. For some reason it took me a while, but my mom finally convinced me it would be best to just throw it away. So I did. And when I say I threw it away, I mean I threw it out. And when I say threw it out, I mean I threw it out of my car window while I was driving. Sue me. I was flustrated. Intentional L.