Hi. My name is Linda, and I am a serial phone killer.
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| Nothing drives a point like an inspirational photo. #beardedwisdom Photo cred: Duck Dynasty, which fortunately I have never seen. |
Phones for which I am responsible do not last long.
This is an entirely unintentional behavior. Whenever a phone comes into my stewardship, I plan to care for it during its entire 2+ year stay. I imagine all of the funny texts and pictures it will receive, the calls it will make, the place it will sleep as it charges at night. I'm like Marie Barone in that and keep the original plastic screen protector on for months and months.
This will be the phone that makes it, I think to myself. This phone will break the curse.
But alas, it never is.
Maybe I am actually just really hard to live with, so the phones just suicide their way out of being with me. This would also explain why I am, as yet, unmarried. #menacetosociety #happy25thbirthday
Regardless of why my phones hate me, since I got my first phone around the year 2008, I have been through phones like the Von Trapp children went through governesses.
They have died the following ways:
- Toilet dives (twice)
- Personal tours of washing machine non-delicate cycles (twice)
- Left outside (ground of a parking lot, front steps, fences, school playgrounds) overnight in:
- Snowstorms
- Rainstorms
- Hailstorms
- Dropped from various devastating heights (at least 6... can't actually remember all of them.)
- Elevator shafts
- Multi-story buildings
- My hand: the gravitational speed from about the height of my waist to the ground is apparently too much for a phone screen to handle. (three times)
- Run over by train
- Run over by cars
This is just a (somewhat complete) list of ways my phone has died past the point of DIY recovery. This doesn't include the many times my phone has simply run away from me (bowling alleys, different schools, people's houses, gas stations, libraries, BYU hallways, etc.)
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| Meet Maria: iPhone 5C, with a whopping 8 GB memory. Funds invested: >$500. Net worth: $30. |
Even now, as I'm writing all of this down, I am horrified by my phono-cide behavior. The disasters just keep going and going and going... What is the matter with me???
Take my current phone, for example: my first (and only) smart phone, which I got in October 2014. Initial reactions could be something like: Oh my goodness! You have owned the SAME PHONE for two years!!!
But I should clarify. I have paid for the following repairs, in addition to the actual phone.
Since, after all, why should I get the warranty? ....Sigh....
- Run over (by the car I was driving) two weeks after purchase
- Screen was smashed beyond usability when dropped on a tile floor around Thanksgiving time #happyholidays
- Screen was cracked when dropped whilst walking a dog* but was still usable until
- Screen was dropped from my hand on the ground en route to a wedding, chipping out an entire inch-wide corner of the screen.
*Yes: it did contribute to my general and reasonable dislike of dogs.
Now, here we are. Two years after initial purchase.
And this is the current view my phone camera provides.
| Photo cred: Me. October 30, 2016 |
It's one of the reasons why I've taken so long to write another blog post, because everyone knows that people hate reading but love pictures. The more juicy pictures you have on a post, the more likely people will read it... Yada yada yada.
Not that it really matters anyway, because apparently I'm only posting about all the embarrassing things that happen to me in order to ensure that I am a societal pariah... so why would I want a bigger audience??
I didn't even drop my phone this time. The camera spontaneously stopped working. Granted, the selfie mode does work. So now I just inconspicuously flip my phone around whenever I want to take a picture of something. Which isn't conspicuous at all, really. And definitely produces the same high-definition, non-pixelated results.
| My original photo had a smiling model, but then I was wearing a Ute hoodie and OBVIOUSLY couldn't post something like that on the internet. Gross. And after a certain number of selfies, one just has to accept that one is not as photogenic as all those other Insta-grammies out there. |
The normal camera just quit: it doesn't want to work for me anymore. My poor phone is leading a miserable life. I keep fixing it, but maybe it's time to say goodbye, and I should just put it down. Let the phone go to iHeaven.
The funds I could have reallocated from the enormous financial contribution I've made to iPhone repairs could have bought me a SWEET new phone... But it was the principle of the experience:
I AM RESPONSIBLE ENOUGH TO OWN
THE SAME PHONE FOR AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF TIME.
And, by tomorrow, I will officially have made it two years.
That is how you solve a problem like Maria.
