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Rest in Rice: My Poor, Dead iPhone (2007 to 2009)

Last night I lost something very dear to me. While I was making my bed, my comforter bumped over a glass containing a tiny amount of water, which seeped right into my iPhone’s weak spot — the dock connector. The screen turned white followed by a series of fluorescent colors, as if my iPhone were seeing its life flash before its eyes. Then it shut off and wouldn’t turn on again. Just a year and a half old, my iPhone was dead.

I began treading through the five stages of loss and grief. First, I was in Denial that the damn thing was borked. I quickly immersed the phone in a container of dry rice — a moisture-pulling method many nerds preach about when it comes to reviving soaked electronics — and in the morning I checked to see if my poor iPhone would show any signs of life. No dice.

Then I succumbed to Anger. I cursed at the handset, shaking it accusingly as if it had purposely swallowed the deadly H2O to commit suicide. “Work, dammit, work!” I shouted.

After that failed, I slipped into Bargaining. “If only I owned a longer night stand so the water wouldn’t have reached the phone,” I thought. “Or if only it were wearing protection.”

I quickly sank into Depression and self-pity. “What lousy timing,” I complained to Wired.com science editor Betsy Mason. “I’m flying to New York next week for business, and right now would be an incredibly stupid time to buy a new iPhone since the third-gen is probably coming out in two months. My life is a greek tragedy.”

“Stop whining,” she replied. “It’s just a phone.”

“It’s not just a phone!” I cried. “It’s an iPod, a phone and an internet mobile communicator. It was my life in my pocket!”

“Oh, shut up.”

Hours later, I circled around to Acceptance and started thinking of ways to move on. I reached out to my Twitter followers asking if anyone had a spare iPhone lying around. Fortunately Jason Snell, my former editor in chief at Macworld, was able to loan me an iPhone for a few days until I find a permanent solution.

And now that I’m done mourning, I’m reaching out to Wired.com readers so we can all learn something from my loss. What would you do with a drowned iPhone? I’m thinking selling it through the e-junk trader Gazelle is an option, though it won’t earn me much. E-mail your suggestions to bchen [at] Wired [dot] com. (Our comment system is temporarily disabled due to a system upgrade.)

Or, if you’re feeling super optimistic, feel free to send in any kooky methods you used to revive your soaked iPhones, and I might consider trying them and documenting my experience. I’ll leave mine buried in rice for a few more days, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Photo: Brian X. Chen/Wired.com
[Thanks: http://blog.wired.com]

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