Good news on Mabel’s iPhone. After its dunk in the toilet
the
phone was rinsed and locked in a bag of rice for a
week. (The rice
will absorb all the moisture.) After three days we
gave up and
Mab started shopping for a new iPhone ($750). After 5
days we
were sure the phone had given up its ghost and Mabel pulled
out her old iPhone and got it activated. After 7 days the
phone
showed some very small signs of life. The little Apple logo
would
light up and then all would go quiet. On the 8th
day after being
charged, the phone booted to the lock screen. I ran upstairs
and showed Mabel this miracle. Kind of a miracle in reverse
since
the phone went in the toilet on Easter Weekend. Mabel
unlocked
the phone and everything sprang to the desktop. All the
juicy fruit
colored icons were clamoring for attention. Everything
looked normal
until Mabel loaded an app with a white background. The
screen looked
like a sky with big puffy white clouds. It was really kind
of pretty but
the fact was the screen had been compromised. Mabel
was still happy
that the phone functioned normally aside from the art deco
patterns
on the screen. She tested the battery life and made calls
and sent texts.
Everything worked! And after a few days when next I looked
at the phone
the clouds seemed to be slightly smaller. I pulled up the
memo app that
looks like lined paper and counted how many lines the clouds
crossed.
This was to compare the screen at a later date to see if the
clouds really
had diminished. Mabel loved this idea and ran with it. She
covered only
the areas on the screen that were cloudy with a variety of
characters to
pinpoint the problem. It looked like a spell done with
mystic ruins.
The next day Mabel showed me her screen and it was apparent
that
the clouds were moving away. Yesterday they were almost gone
and in some small way I will miss them. Now Mabel has just
another
normal iPhone. Tonight I will press it to my nose and
hope to smell
a tiny bit of pee.
